Being levered up, in some cases forty to one or more, means that a turn of a few percentage points against their assets can leave them insolvent. As a consequence, rather than being too big to fail, European banks, when you add their liabilities together, are “too big (for any one government) to bail,” a phenomenon that the euro, as we shall see, only exacerbates.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 37