Soap opera with bubbles

Today’s policymakers, reasoning from the 1930’s, appear to believe that creating confidence is somehow different from creating good reasons to be confident. The recent “stress tests” of European banks were blatantly designed as a confidence-building measure rather than a genuine exploration of possible systemic weaknesses – failing, for instance, to include the possibility of default on Greek sovereign debt.

That, of course, is like testing your home’s fire extinguishers against burglars