Sentences to ponder

And then, finally, there's Peter Eavis's conspiracy theory: if the Greek bond exchange goes really smoothly, and the sun rises in the morning and Italian bond yields stay below 5%, then maybe that's the most worrying outcome of all. Because at that point Greece will have managed to wipe out, at a stroke, debt amounting to some 54% of GDP. You can see how Portugal and Ireland might be a little jealous. You don't want to make sovereign default too easy — not least because it would do extremely nasty things to European banks' balance sheets.

That is Felix Salmon, here is more, in recent times Felix has been the go-to guy for the Greece story: "…we're going through the largest sovereign default in the history of the world, and surprisingly few people — including senior European policymakers and journalists who are covering it professionally — really seem to understand what's going on."