Imagine that you knew Greece was still Greece and Italy was still Italy and that the prices quoted in the markets represented the bond-buying activities of banks pushing down yields rather than an estimate of the risk of the bond itself. Why would you buy such securities if the yield did not reflect the risk? You might realize that if you bought enough of them—if you became really big—and those assets lost value, you would become a danger to your national banking system and would have to be bailed out by your sovereign. If you were not bailed out, given your exposures, cross-border linkages to other banks, and high leverage, you would pose a systemic risk to the whole European financial sector. As such, the more risk that you took onto your books, especially in the form of periphery sovereign debt, the more likely it was that your risk would be covered by the ECB, your national government, or both. This would be a moral hazard trade on a continental scale.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 226