The direct losses of 4 countries (Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal) leaving the EZone are estimated at 17 trillion.

Money you can print.

This would be the worst economic crisis in modern times and take more than a decade to overcome.

This is already the worst economic crisis in modern times, it will already take decades (plural) to reverse the damage, and rebuilding cannot even begin until present policy is scuttled wholesale and replaced with one that is not starkly insane.

So far the losses haven't been materialized, they are potential.

Going by the Russian experience, somewhere between 5 and 15 thousand people are likely to have died of austerity-related excess mortality in Greece alone since the beginning of the present depression. And that number increases by a handful every day.

That is true. However, France is a split country in the sense that socialist supporters including intellectuals, civil servants and the like see themselves as the leader of the South, whereas the business and industry community is much closer to Germany and the North. That is why a split of the EU is going to very much polarize opinion in France.

That doesn't mean that France will split north/south. It is much more probable, particularly given the French tradition for strong centralism, that France will commit fully to one side or the other, with the defeated fraction dragged along kicking and screaming, and, if the bad guys win that internal confrontation, occasionally rioting.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.