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Today, there are two blocs within the monetary union: a strong currency bloc in the north and a weak one in the south.

Otmar Issing, the ECB’s former chief economist, recalls how, before 1981, “the Italian Treasury set yields for government debt. All the bonds that couldn’t be sold at that price had to be bought up by the Banca d’Italia.” Hence easy money, exploding debt, double-digit inflation – and no change in the country’s frozen politics. Why reform when you can always devalue?

It is the second time the ECB declined to accept Greek bonds as collateral. The first was in February, after Athens imposed steep losses on private creditors in a debt restructuring. That suspension ended after a little more than an week, when the ECB received guarantees from euro-zone governments that Greek bonds posted to the ECB as collateral would be repaid.

For banks, which are already under intense pressure, it means that they will have to resort to emergency liquidity assistance which will lend them with a higher rate.It is bad news and all we can hope for is that it won't last for long," a senior Greek banker said.

Mario Boselli, chairman of the Italian Chamber of Fashion, frets that larger emerging economies still account for only 10% of total Italian exports. "This is not enough" to offset the weakness in developed economies, he says.

Both Mr. Boselli and Philip Halpin, an adviser to the Irish Exporters' Association, say the euro would have to fall as low as $1.10 (from about $1.23 currently), to produce a robust export-led recovery.

Ludovic Subran, chief economist at French trade-credit insurer Euler Hermes, warns that might not be enough. Such a depreciation would have little effect in France because high taxes and rigid labor costs reduce the potential benefits, he says.

Any euro-zone economy would benefit from a drop in the euro to the extent that it can redirect more resources to external markets. But the willingness and ability of businesses to do that differs across the region. Nadio Delai, chairman of Italian research and consultancy firm Ermeneia, say a host of smaller, less prestigious Italian shoe and textile companies have started to export to emerging markets, riding the coattails of more famous names.

It has to be through a combination of structural reforms, hoping they will work, and nominal wage adjustments, although one cannot be incredibly optimistic about the scope there. We know that that’s going to take a while.

The banks have to be recapped, and they have to be recapped not using sovereign money. I think that is really very, very high on the agenda. I don’t think they can make it without help to the banks.

If the banks were healthier, I think they would lend at lower rates

And the sovereigns have to be able to borrow at reasonable rates. As long as they behave and they do all the things they’re asked to do, they have to be able to borrow at lower rates than they currently do. Some way has to be found to do it.

We’ve done simulations. Other people have done simulations as well. 10% real depreciation would lead to a 1.4% increase in growth for a year — which at this stage, given the numbers, would be nice. The footnote, and it’s a very big footnote, is that … how much you benefit depends on how big your exports are related to your GDP and where you export — whether you export in the euro zone or outside. Unfortunately the countries that benefit the most are the countries that really don’t need it — Germany, the Netherlands. The countries that benefit the least are Greece, Portugal, Italy, Spain

There’s no question, the periphery countries have to improve their competitiveness. That’s not something even monetary policy at the level of the euro or fiscal policy can do. This they have to do through productivity improvements or nominal wage adjustments.

It is no secret that they have tended to respond to crises rather than be much more proactive.

And now there’s a sense in which they’re thinking about the full architecture.

At this stage I think there is a genuine commitment to thinking about the whole beast. That’s why these words — fiscal union, banking union — have come in.

Where I think there is still a problem is that all these things will take a lot of time. And some of these things may not happen because they’re unpopular. And meanwhile, there is a fire in the house. So they have to be willing to do more in the short term.

More importantly and less known to German taxpayers, Greece will also default on 155 billion euros directly owed to the euro system (comprised of the ECB and the 17 national central banks in the euro area). This includes 110 billion euros provided automatically to Greece through the Target2 payments system—which handles settlements between central banks for countries using the euro. As depositors and lenders flee Greek banks, someone needs to finance that capital flight, otherwise Greek banks would fail. This role is taken on by other euro area central banks, which have quietly lent large funds, with the balances reported in the Target2 account. The vast bulk of this lending is, in practice, done by the Bundesbank since capital flight mostly goes to Germany, although all members of the euro system share the losses if there are defaults.

No responsible bank would claim these sums are minor risks to its capital or to taxpayers. These claims also amount to 43 percent of German Gross Domestic Product,

But figures released in 2010, disputed by Malawi’s ministry of agriculture, suggest that the harvest was only 2.1m tonnes. If maize production had risen as much as claimed, Malawians should have have had a surplus of maize and prices should have dropped. That did not happen, says Mr Jerven.

European utilities like E.On of Germany have announced plans to shut down less-polluting natural gas-fired plants that have been undercut by dirtier coal-burning generators benefiting from a flood of low-cost coal imports and low carbon emissions prices.

Despite the upfront costs associated with green energy projects, they are inexpensive to run. In contrast, Europe’s gas and coal plants, which also provide backup power when renewables cannot operate, need constant spending on fossil fuels.

Water-assisted fracturing has been in use since the late 1940s, but it became “fracking” only recently, when it was married with horizontal drilling and the advanced sensing techniques that let it be used deep underground. Energy costs are surprisingly small; a Swiss-American research team calculated in 2011 that the average EROEI for fracked gas in a representative Pennsylvania county was about 87—about six times better than for Persian Gulf oil and 16 times better than for tar sands. (Fracking uses a lot of water, though, and activists charge that the chemicals contaminate underground water supplies.)

and pollution that kills more than 10,000 Americans a year (that estimate is from a 2010 National Research Council study).

In mid-March, Japan’s Chikyu test ended a week early, after sand got in the well mechanism. But by then the researchers had already retrieved about 4 million cubic feet of natural gas from methane hydrate, at double the expected rate.

How much of Venezuela’s oil wealth Hugo Chávez hijacked for his own political purposes is unknown, because his government stopped publishing the relevant income and expenditure figures. Similarly, Ross points out, Saddam Hussein allocated more than half the government’s funds to the Iraq National Oil Company; nobody has any idea what happened to the stash, though, because INOC never released a budget. (Saddam personally directed the nationalization of Iraqi oil in 1972, then leveraged his control of petroleum revenues to seize power from his rivals.)

Over the last year, more than 40 percent of job growth has been in low-paying sectors including retail, leisure/hospitality (hotels and restaurants) and temporary help agencies.

The economy’s growth rate has been less than half the rate of previous recoveries and the employment losses in the Great Recession were more than twice as large as those in previous recessions.