The European sovereign debt crisis has thrown up the idea of a single European bond issuer to pool the credit quality of European governments. That would be good news for beleaguered periphery sovereigns that have seen their funding costs balloon in recent weeks, but it is strange that this has become viable when the governments themselves are under so much pressure.

The last time this was seriously mooted, as reported by Financial News at the end of 2008 http://bit.ly/fAbiCr, the focus was on bank funding costs. Since then, governments have been dragged into the crisis in a way that was unimaginable then.