In sum, in each country, and across the Eurozone as a whole, European banks have become too big to bail. No sovereign, even with its own printing press, can bail out a bank with exposures of this magnitude. If you have signed up to a currency arrangement whereby you gave yours away, you really are in trouble. As Simon Tilford and Philip Whyte put it bluntly, the Eurozone crisis is “a tale of excess bank leverage and poor risk management in the core … [and] the epic misallocation of capital by excessively leveraged banks.”

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 231