Lots of USA economists have been warning about this now for over a year, specifically that European central banks not only failed to follow the lead of our FOMC in cutting rates aggressively (as they should have), initially they even turned up their noses and critized the FOMC’s rate cuts. There have been several great articles on this topic in the WSJ.
So European central banks were VERY LATE (relative to USA) in implementing fiscal stimulus in response to the global recession, and the financial meltdown.