Remember Jethro Tull?

They were the first rock band I ever saw, back in Oxford in late 1974 or thereabouts.

One hit was Too Old to Rock ‘n’ Roll, Too Young to Die.

Now we have the largest European banks being "too big to fail, but also too big to be saved":

… the total liabilities of Deutsche Bank (leverage ratio over 50!) amount to about €2,000bn (more than Fannie Mae) or more than 80 per cent of the gross domestic product of Germany.

This is simply too much for the Bundesbank or even the German state, given that the German budget is bound by the rules of the European Union’s stability pact and the German government cannot order (unlike the US Treasury) its central bank to issue more currency.

Such European behemoths are in some way other supportable by the European Central Bank as "the only institution that can issue unlimited amounts of a global reserve currency". Unlimited? Presumably not – printing money on the scale needed will not be brilliant either.

However:

the authorities in the UK and Switzerland – which cannot rely on the ECB – can only pray that no accident happens to the giants they have in their own garden.

Gulp.