" I and others were adamant that it was essential for the ECB to step in and buy the debt of troubled governments, to head off what looked very much like self-fulfilling panic. The ECB refused to do that, and many of us took that refusal at face value"
"... in reality it did the functional equivalent, lending very large sums to banks with sovereign debt as collateral, so that it was in effect doing the purchases we wanted, but laundering those purchases through banks."
so when the market rallies the private banks get the big cap gains ....lovely double hit that
first the pressure isn't withdrawn to clamp the fiscal budgets and sell public assets
but the system is kept shy of panic by indirect interventions
