In the Germany-as-Machiavelli version, that doesn't really matter: What matters is that it can be spun as "shiftless PIGS creating a crisis - we have to save our stalwart German bankers from those irresponsible brown people."

In the Germany-as-Clueless version, it doesn't necessarily matter either, because the markets have the predictive power of a bipolar crack monkey and the attention span of a ferret on speed, and our politicians are so thoroughly indoctrinated that they could have most of their higher brain functions replaced by Bloomberg feeds and nobody would notice the difference.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.