After the US, the country with the biggest banking problem is probably Germany. Last week the German cabinet adopted a bank rescue plan worth looking at in detail. If you want to know how long the European crisis will last, this might give you the answer.

The Geithner/Summers plan in the US has two fundamental planks – a strategy to ring-fence structured finance products for which there is no market, and a strategy to recapitalise the banking system. Both seem to be based on unrealistically optimistic assumptions about the economic recovery. And both have been criticised sharply, mainly for that reason.