By looking only at inflation rates, budget deficits, and state debts, EU planners failed to see the growth of a banking system that is too big to bail. The price of their hubris is the belief among European elites that only a decade or more of unremitting austerity will suffice to prop them up, perhaps at the ultimate cost of undermining of the European political project. This may be the true price of saving the banks. Not just the end of the euro, but the end of the European political project itself, which would be perhaps the ultimate tragedy for Europe.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 256