...you believe in the Great Pumpkin.
Chin-straps on, ya'll. This could get eventful.
Robert Peston provides a more droll summation of the conundrum:
The maths goes like this. After a recently approved expansion, the EFSF has €440bn to disburse. But €133bn of this has already been allocated to propping up Greece, Ireland and Portugal. And as I mentioned yesterday, yet more EFSF money may have to go to Greece to prevent it defaulting.
Turn away now
So right now there is just under €290bn left in the EFSF kitty. Which could go down to less than €250bn if Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy draw on it to recapitalise their respective banks.
If you don't want to be scared, turn away now.
Italy needs to borrow €250bn next year just to refinance its existing debts that are coming due for repayment - and not including the new money it will need to borrow.
Or to put it another way, if Italy is shut out of markets - which is not impossible - then the EFSF in its current form will not have even enough money to tide Italy over, let alone keep alive any other eurozone governments that run into difficulties.
Which is why it is so vitally important, as I've been banging on about, for the resources of the EFSF to be massively increased.
And that is why the failure of eurozone governments, and Germany and France in particular, to agree on how to expand the EFSF is so troubling.
So as you can presumably now see, a full-scale eurozone financial crisis can't be averted by any individual initiative but requires a whole package of remedial measures, of which strengthening the banks and enlarging the bailout fund are the two most crucial.
It requires, in other words, a level of cooperation that would be difficult to achieve amongst nations ruled by saints.
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