Besides being funded via short-term borrowing on US markets, it turned out that those conservative, risk-averse European banks hadn’t missed the US mortgage crisis after all. In fact, over 70 percent of the SPVs set up to deal in US “asset backed commercial paper” (mortgages) we encountered in chapter 2 were set up by European banks. The year 2008 may have been a crisis in the US mortgage markets, but it had European funders and channels, and most of those devalued assets remain stuck on the balance sheets of European banks domiciled in states with no printing presses.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 236