One of the ironies that has always struck more than the other 4,392 about the EU is how everything libertarian or of no importance must be standardised, but nothing that matters is. As the world yawns in expectation of the stress-test ‘results’ today, it would be hard to imagine five continents more diverse than the 16 eurozone states when it comes to banking.

There is no all-member bank regulator in Europe. The 27 member states basically set their own solvency standards and capital rules. They have their own accounting procedures.

In some EU States, the banks are so large and so few that they have become effectively part of it – taxpayer owned or not. Government deficits over the long term – and the sub-prime disaster in the short term – have rendered them non-identical twins in the same womb.

Some banks are being rigorously gone over by inspectors, some are inspecting themselves, and many are missing – probably over half overall, and getting on for two-thirds in Spain.

Ultimately, credit agencies score, currency dealers evaluate and markets decide based on one key consideration: will the government save the bank if it goes bust? Before 2008, the answer almost everywhere in the EU was “yes, almost certainly”. Today, most governments lack the cash-flow to do that without printing money.

None of this applies in the US, where despite the Fed/Bank insidious incest in terms of employees, there is no sense that the banks are part of Government. Thanks to some of the dirt emerging from beneath a dozen carpets, that view is changing. But the point is this: the American stress tests (while applied using pro-bank criteria – imagine that) were to an agreed format, rapid and entirely open to public surveillance because they were done for the American people, not a set of markets and voracious hedge funds abroad. It is still true that, by and large, the average American ignores the rest of the world and how it thinks.

The problems the EU will face after the results are the same as they were before: nobody believes a word they say any more. The nature of the Union’s innate secrecy, anti-democratic attitudes – and assumption that every observer must be stupid – will do for them over this issue; and while that is an irony to relish for those of us who fear its advance, it is going to cause havoc for its trading partners.

As Chris Whalen concludes at the Reuters site this morning:

‘The capital markets…..are unlikely to be impressed by a process that is as flimsy and lacking in independent validation as this hastily concocted exercise in simulated prudential oversight’.

That works for me.