Yesterday, the Slog published its own small-scale study describing sentiment among objective professionals. While that can be useful for piercing the opaque bubble of spin surrounding everything these day, it is laughable to hear Wall Street calling eurozone lending ‘a no-go area’ and ‘losing creditor trust’ after some of the awful crookery, mismanagement and bonkers crowd behaviour that that been the hallmark of capitalist finance over the last year.

I’m told, for example, that Chinese leader Hu Jintao lectured Secretary Clinton this week on the subject of eurozone fiscal indiscipline. Not only does this suggest Mr Hu’s geography is a bit hazy, it’s a bit rich coming from a leadership which appears to have only two economic speeds – Full Ahead Both and Dead Stop.

Reform may be called for in Europe, but bankers have changed little or nothing about their behaviour since 2008: still getting big bonuses, still selling debt to people who can’t afford it – and as of the last few weeks, getting back into credit default swaps (CDSs) big-time.

Having been riddled with toxic debt borrowed by Elmer Grits for his tree house three years ago, the banking boys and big sovereign bond-buyers now find themselves with billion-dollar write offs because the collateral appears to be three goats and a fishing boat. So out comes the same tired old game of Russian roulette minus only the empty cylinder: CDSs soared this month, and this March just gone, Business Week insisted that ‘if Europe curtails the use of [CDS] and other derivatives, it will hurt, not help, the continent’s sickly economies’.

That may be true as a form of short-term pain alleviation, but when will capitalist finance catch on to the rules saying (a) if you need a hedge that badly, then don’t lend the money in the first place; and (b) once every debt held by everyone is bad, CDS as a practice is just a gigantic game of NIMBY: “Here’s a parcel, pass it on and make it snappy…jeeez, that stinks”.