Well, Anorak's efforts to lead-manage our plan to cheer up the Germans may be too little, too late, but at least we've found some more of those Weapons of Mass Financial Destruction; it turns out that the Hypo Bailout Mark 1 sank on the discovery by the commercial banks who were supposed to be funding it that Hypo needed vastly more money than it had admitted to.
Nope, it wasn't just lending money on garbage to people with no means to repay it, leaving it with a $35 billion hole in its balance sheet, it had issued guarantees to back American municipal bonds that it had sold to investors.
As they always say, the devil is in the details, and these details run to $15 billion owing on those guarantees.
Traditionally the next step is to invade Poland.
The way things are going we may have to upgrade our recommendation from 'sell' to 'run for your lives'...