Number Of The Year: "Unlimited"

For the first time this year, Brussels is awash with the opulent optimists of Europe as the finance ministers meet to decide how much of the EUR500bn ESM funds can be funneled direct to their banks and bypass the greedy governments. The problem, of course, as Bloomberg notes, is that with officials declaring the worst of the region’s three-year market emergency over, finance ministers are debating whether the ESM should take over earlier bank bailouts that were routed through governments and what to do with so-called legacy assets. The issue is that the actual amount of ESM funds available for direct aid to banks may be less than 100 billion euros because the fund needs to fulfill its main mission of lending to governments that lose market access. However, at the core is an uncomfortable reality that all is not well, one Brussels-based think-tank noted: "It’s really about signaling,...