While I am away, swing by Spiegel Online for an optimistic analysis of the underlying strength of the Eurozone by Sven Böll:

European governments are serious about austerity, while in the US there is no sign of how President Barack Obama plans to get his country’s trillion-dollar deficit under control. Close to 9 percent of all US public spending this year was financed on credit, a considerably greater amount than in the euro zone.

And whereas the European Central Bank has at least kept the inflation rate in mind with its currency policies, the US Federal Reserve keeps pumping billions of new dollars into the economy. It is unclear what the outcome of this gigantic wager will be.

This argument amounts to saying that "we may be bad – but everyone else is worse". Undignified. But in the strange world of money where you either have one currency or another, maybe that’s OK?

Dan Hannan MEP gloomily agrees:

I’ve just been talking to a brilliant man, perhaps the most financially successful of all my contemporaries, an investor whose advice I’d follow unhesitatingly if I had anything to invest.

He is confident that the euro will endure its present travails, for one reason above all: its survival suits Germany. The cost of bailing out the peripheral members is more than outweighed, he believes, by the benefits to German industry of an artificially low exchange rate. The ideal outcome for Germany is for the euro to limp on, battered and cheapened, and for the European Central Bank to be pushed into quantitative easing.

Never mind the German public’s atavistic attachment to a strong currency, he says; German exporters know a good thing when they see one…

There could come a point, of course, when the cost of propping up the single currency outweighs the benefits. A Spanish collapse might mark that moment, although Spain is not in the same position as Portugal or Greece. But, says my friend, we are some way from that point.

It is important for sceptics to understand what we mean by “the euro crisis”. Europe’s tragedy is not that its monetary union might sunder, but that it might hold, condemning the peoples of its outer nations to a generation of deflation, poverty and emigration.

Good point. Could the costs of this success be ruinous for some, even if not for all? Would those countries left to decay be able to sustain the popular support or even basic governance coherence for the policies needed to stay in the Zone?

In Ireland at least the horses already are suffering mightily. And are being executed.