Reparos

A tese de  Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa de Portugal de ter sido usado como carambola para passar um aviso à União Europeia quanto ao modo como irá resolver o problema grego, tem todo o sentido: “Portugal foi atacado para atacar a Grécia” | Económico.

No entretanto, não me apercebi que, quando me referia aqui à Itália nestes termos: "....e isso poderá explicar em parte, porque, apesar da má saúde dos seus indicadores, ter passado ao lado, pelo menos até agora, da má vontade dos "mercados"", esse período de graça já tinha terminado.

Quanto ao momento europeu, gostei desta nota:

Europe's debt crisis: The cost of Europe's dithering | The Economist

ALL along, it has been clear that sovereign-debt troubles in Greece, Ireland, and Portugal were primarily a political challenge, rather than an economic challenge, for the euro zone as a whole. Insolvency was and remains a serious issue for these smaller peripheral economies, but because they're small there was no question of Europe's ability to handle the mess, only a question of how costs might be shared.

There was a risk, however, that a badly mismanaged effort to deal with the debt mess in these small countries could shake market confidence in the debt of other and larger economies, most notably Spain and Italy. If Spain were plunged into a Greek-like situation, the fiscal math of the crisis would suddenly grow much more difficult. And should Italy fall into serious trouble. As a Schumpeter post from Friday put it:

If Spain has long been considered too big to fail, then a full-blown Italian debt crisis would be cataclysmic. The country’s bond market is the third-largest in the world, after America’s and Japan’s. That has been seen as a source of a comfort: bond investors find it hard to avoid a market that big and liquid. But it is also a source of widespread financial infection.

That post goes on to make a critical point: sovereign and bank exposures to Italian debt are far larger than are exposures to the debts of any other troubled country. If there have been fears that a Greek default might require a new round of bank recapitalisations, well, one shudders to think of the impact on banks of an Italian restructuring. [....]