The euro-zone today:

Via Sky:

There has been a further deterioration in the euro debt crisis, with shares on both the Italian and Spanish markets falling sharply. In Friday trading markets fell by as much as 5.8% on the Spanish Ibex, while the Mib in Italy was down by as much as 4.5%. In London, the FTSE 100 closed 1.09% down. The Spanish 10-year debt yield peaked above 7.22%, rising sharply after the 17 eurozone finance ministers approved a 100bn euro (£77.8bn) bank bailout deal.

The Economist:

Of course, markets don’t doubt that Europe can save the situation, only that it will. Further deterioration will probably prompt new interventions: an official rescue programme for Spain, perhaps, and maybe European Central Bank QE. Euro-area leaders still believe they can pull the single currency back from the brink, and for now they’re still correct. But while they resist the policies that could make a real difference in solving the problem—real sovereign risk-sharing, real euro-zone-wide bank guarantees backed by the ECB, and higher inflation in Germany—each new intervention will buy a bit less time. And the capital flight from the periphery will continue and peripheral recessions will deepen. And then, one day, it may all come apart in a flash.

Whether that shopping list of remedies de jour would actually do the trick is debatable, but what they would do is gut European democracy still further. Not that that particular Economist correspondent appears to care.

Here’s someone who does, however (Handelsblatt reports (via Open Europe)):

“…[C]ommenting on the bailouts, former East German dissident and CDU MP Vera Lengsfeld told Handelsblatt that “If MPs allow the government to withhold information but still vote with the government [on the Spanish bailout], even after repeated reminders, the Bundestag is abdicating its control function and increasingly resembling the ‘People’s Chamber’ of the DDR.