From Bloomberg:
European policy makers may need to stump up as much as 600 billion euros ($794 billion) in aid or buy government bonds if they are to stamp out the region’s spreading fiscal crisis, said economists at JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc.
With Greece’s budget turmoil infecting markets from Rome to Madrid, economists are urging German Chancellor Angela Merkel, European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet and other officials to come up with unprecedented measures. Other steps could see governments guaranteeing bonds and the ECB abandoning collateral rules or reviving unlimited lending to banks, the economists said.
As OECD head Angel Gurria likens the crisis to the Ebola virus, Europe may need to come up with a plan equivalent to the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program deployed by the U.S. after the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. “It is perhaps time to think of policy options of the last resort in the current sovereign crisis,” said David Mackie, chief European economist at JPMorgan in London.
“This is like Ebola,” Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Secretary General Gurria told Bloomberg Television yesterday. “It’s threatening the stability of the financial system.” The World Health Organization calls Ebola “one of the most virulent viral diseases known to humankind.”
Barnaby Is Right 
The Hawke government did a lot of things which looked as though they wanted to destroy the system. They deregulated the banks then vigourously promoted Bond and others who abused that deregulation, even as Bond was doing the things that landed him in gaol later.
A number of times they changed tax rules to encourage investment in a particular area, then changed again to bankrupt that investment. Remember the racehorse industry? And the huge promotion of investment in tourism, which investment was then bankrupted with the pilots’ strike? Remember the double dipping tax on rental housing?
This all represented a systematic destruction of private capital.
Rudd’s policies have continued the destruction of private capital. Remember, public debt is funded by private capital, by way of taxation. Rudd’s “stimulus” will in time become a halter.
In trying to assess the whole GFC past, present and future, the question should be considered, are there people who want a collapse? Are there people who want to install a different economic model?