Looking back at the past year, it would be easy to summarise the events of 2010 as the global financial crisis Part 1 – the one created by financial market professionals, sleepy regulators, institutional investors and artificially low interest rates – giving way seamlessly to potentially an equally pernicious, tumultuous and damaging global financial crisis Part 2, this time created by profligate, over-indebted European sovereign governments.

There’s something very disturbing about the notion of governments going bust; it undermines the sense of...Read more