The ECB then quickly came under fire - mostly from Italy whose banks have the biggest notional amount of bad loans - for demanding that banks set aside far more capital as loss buffer for when the €900 billion in bad loans are ultimately discharged.

Fast forward six months when it now appears that the European central bank came, saw... and ran away when faced with what now appears to be an certifiably insurmountable problem: as Reuters reported this morning, the ECB "is considering shelving planned rules that would have forced banks to set aside more money against their stock of unpaid loans, after suffering a political backlash."