Portugal is still in trouble, Spain will be back on the coals after its Nov. 20 election, and if I were a bond trader, I would be shorting Belgium, which has serious deficit and debt problems, runs for months at a time without a government and is in some danger of splitting apart into its French and Flemish bits.
A bailout package for Greece has been agreed to, but the Greeks are struggling to form a government to implement it. And yields on Italian bonds are moving ominously higher, rising above the 7% that some think marks a point of no return.
So does this mean that a euro breakup and a Eurozone economic collapse are inevitable?
Not really.
In fact, of all the European nations in crisis, only Italy has the potential to take down either the euro or the global economy.
Just take a look for yourself.
Getting Rid of Greece
At this point, Greece obviously is a goner as far as the Eurozone is concerned.Really, it should have been pushed out 18 months ago, when it was first revealed that the country falsified its figures to gain acceptance into the Eurozone in the first place. Its government deficit at the time was 12% of gross domestic product (GDP) - not the 6% it claimed, let alone the 3% it had agreed to abide to on its entry.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy already has admitted it was a mistake to let Greece into the Eurozone, because the gap between its economy and the well-managed polities of Northern Europe was much larger than the area's other members.
Former communist countries like Slovenia and Slovakia have integrated quite smoothly into the Eurozone, because their governments and people had already acquired the discipline necessary for membership. But since its entry into the European Union (EU) in 1981, Greece has lived on handouts, and raised its living standards artificially to a level two- or three-times the market value of its output. Exit from the euro is inevitable; Greece's problem cannot be solved in any other way.
In fact, the sooner Greece exits the euro, the better. As it stands now, it's rapidly becoming impossible for Greece to get its debt down to a manageable level, since the country's official debt has been deemed untouchable.
Once the EU leaders acknowledge the need to remove Greece from the Eurozone, the country's exit will be neither difficult nor damaging. The process of recreating the drachma will be similar to that followed in Slovenia, Croatia, and other ex-Yugoslav republics which abandoned the Yugoslav dinar in the 1990s.
Inevitably, Greece will have to default on much of its debt, but it's already doing that now.
So if it's handled correctly, Greece should not be a problem for the Eurozone or the world economy.