You need a Nobel Prize to be this slow, apparently...

1. Greek euro exit, very possibly next month.

.......

4a. Germany has a choice. (Dancing around the actual reality, which is permanent, public and obvious subsidy to nations such as Spain) or....

4b. End of the euro.

It took this long Paul? Is there something about getting a PhD or Nobel that makes your IQ sink by a solid 50 handles?

The problem at the core is the same one we have -- you cannot finance a deficit against operating income indefinitely no matter who you are -- a government or private entity.

It doesn't work.

When private entities engage in deficit financing their leverage builds up until a tiny negative movement in value detonates the firm in question.  Lenders call their lines or refuse to roll them over and issue new ones, and the company finds itself unable to make payroll or the light bill.  Boom.

When public entities that cannot print their own currency do this, the same thing happens.  Leverage builds until that tiny movement in value makes repayment impossible and rollover is withheld.  Boom.

When public entities that can print their own currency do this and attempt to run the printing press to prevent the above from happening, the leverage they take on is distributed into the population through reduced purchasing power.  This, in an easy credit environment, induces private entities in the marketplace, both corporate and individual, to increase their leverage through borrowing to maintain purchasing power.  When the ability to add additional leverage is exhausted the people are unable to purchase necessities such as food, energy and shelter.  Boom.

That the third outcome takes longer than the other two doesn't change the fact that all such machinations must, mathematically, fail.  They must fail because for each credit there is a debit and when one increases the quantity of credit money in the system faster than GDP expands (or does not decrease it at the rate GDP contracts) something, somewhere, becomes more expensive to buy.  Since the definition of GDP is all things sold into the economy there is no way to improve the common man's economic outcome through this set of policies as any "income expansion" that comes through increased credit production beyond GDP must, of mathematical necessity, be absorbed somewhere in the economy through higher prices!

There is no free lunch folks.  Governments must obtain the funds necessary to provide all present-day services the citizens demand through current-day taxes and to preclude credit expansion scams from being run by various parts of the banking system systemic credit expansion in excess of GDP must be recognized as what it is -- effective counterfeiting of the nation's currency -- and barred through criminal sanction.

This is the only way you can have economic stability.  All of the rest of the arm-waving, whether it's by goldbugs or otherwise, is just that -- arm-waving that is intellectually and mathematically bereft of reality.