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The states retained their powers to supervise the small number of state-chartered banks that seemed little threat to the stability of the new more tightly regulated national system.

What was not anticipated was that the more stable national banks would fail to adequately supply credit to the economy.

The process is challenging and complex. First a synthetic gas is made from pure oxygen and methane, the main component of natural gas, which is cleansed of sulfur, metals and other impurities, under intense pressure and heat. Then the synthetic gas is put in giant reactors that make a synthetic crude through the Fischer-Tropsch process. The process essentially forces heated synthetic gas to react with a catalyst, typically cobalt, to convert into a liquid hydrocarbon. Finally that liquid is refined into one fuel or another. The process is far more complex than that at a typical refinery, so the plant is much more expensive to build and operate. Alfred Luaces, a refining specialist at the consultancy IHS, said a conventional oil refinery could be built for $50,000 per barrel of capacity, less than half of what Sasol says it is willing to spend on the proposed Louisiana plant.

Over the last year, funding corresponding to 4% of the region’s GDP – and, in some countries, as much as 15% of GDP – has been withdrawn. Bank subsidiaries will increasingly have to finance local lending with local deposits and other local funding.

The answer to the first question is extremely complicated because the euro crisis is extremely complex. It has both a political and a financial dimension. And the financial dimension can be divided into at least three components: a sovereign debt crisis and a banking crisis, as well as divergences in competitiveness

The buyback is the latest attempt to squeeze debt relief from Greece's private creditors. But Greece may yet face a further restructuring down the road, observers and analysts say—possibly involving official-sector creditors, including other euro-zone countries.

Greece's official creditors—the euro zone, the European Central Bank and the IMF—now hold roughly four-fifths of the country's debt, but have been reluctant to accept losses that would hurt taxpayers.

The bond buyback is a central element of a plan aiming to reduce Greece's debt to 124% of gross domestic product by 2020. The IMF insists debt must be reduced to that level, and well below 110% of GDP two years later, to continue handing out loans to Greece. The buyback seeks to retire about half of the €62 billion in debt that Athens owes private creditors.

Of course, Mr Draghi mumbles about conditionality: cheap cash only in exchange for deficit-slashing and market reforms. Sure. And when Mr Monti and Mariano Rajoy, Spanish prime minister, instead bend to the wishes of their electorates, what then? Will Mr Draghi stop buying and let their bonds go through the floor? Of course not. You do not have to be a central banker to predict the obvious: no market pressure, no reform.

Starting in the mid-late 1990s, offshore financial centres, such as the Cayman Islands, came under increasing pressure from the OECD for their allegedly harmful tax regimes, where the OECD wished to prevent low-tax regimes from having an advantage in the global marketplace. The OECD threatened to place the Cayman Islands and other financial centres on a "black list" and impose sanctions against them.[46] However, the Cayman Islands successfully avoided being placed on the OECD black list in 2000 by committing to regulatory reform to improve transparency and begin information exchange with OECD member countries about their citizens.[46]