It would be a mistake for the leaders of Spain and Italy to assume that if theygotintotroublethey might be bailed out like Greece: neither the EU nor the IMF could afford it.
Perhaps the most shocking thing about recent events was not how rapidly the big Wall Street firms gotintotrouble but how quickly they returned to profitability and lavished big rewards on themselves.
Some will obviously be concerned about financial contagion - the risk that depositors and investors in Italy or Spain will look at this deal and wonder if they could also lose out if their bank gotintotrouble.
Others, like Steven Rattner, gotinto legal trouble when federal regulators and state prosecutors asked questions about how they raised pension fund money.
For the people who gotintotrouble were AIG Financial Products and the problem at AIGFP is that they were not treating their CDS contracts as derivatives whose value changed with underlying prices.