Base Ball is the American Game par excellence because its playing demands Brain and Brawn, and American manhood supplies these ingredients in quantity sufficient to spread over the entire continent.

FORBES: Baseball: Wartime Tool Then and Now

As Martin Wolf of the FT pointed out this morning on Today, this German fear of becoming banker to the entire eurozone even infects the capacity of the European Central Bank to buy the debt of Italy and Spain in sufficient quantity to prevent their sovereign borrowing costs from ballooning to potentially lethal levels.

BBC: Can Merkel and Sarkozy turn the tide of markets?