EFSF. Eurocrisis

This is an excerpt from  Building a Crisis Management Framework for the EU that we wrote for the Crisis Committee of the European Parliament and then presented at the European Commission. Much of the discussion in this paper remains highly relavent and provides a useful guidance to policy makers about what they need to do after stemming the panic in the markets so you would want to read it. 

Despite the fact that the discussion of the euro area crisis has focused primarily on issues in the sovereign debt market, it is instructive to remember at the outset that this crisis is not primarily a sovereign crisis but one that originated in the private financial sector. As often happens in credit crises, private sector debt is taken on to public balance sheets which makes them fragile and can, as in this case, result in serious dislocations of the sovereign debt market.