Sadly, this – the 500th ATEOTD – opens with the news that the pigeon chick didn’t make it. He/She expired some time during last night. It wasn’t attacked, and it was well-fed, but its feet were pointing towards the sky this morning.

This isn’t unusual when avian species receive a severe shock: they will plod on quite happily for a few days, and then suddenly succumb. Its parents, meanwhile, don’t seem to get it. They continue to look for the lost one. It will take a few days before they give up and move on.

But perhaps this might be an occasion for some form of muted celebration; for it seems to me that, at last, some of the wheels are coming off the media gravy train when it comes to fisco-economic realities.

The Austrian Government seems somewhat unwilling to step in and support Österreichische Volksbanken AG (VBAG).

Banco Espiritu Santo has been ruled ‘not a bankruptcy event’, which seems an odd conclusion to reach given the the ECB has bailed it out to the tune of €49bn.

But perhaps more significant than either of these non-events is that Mario Draghi emerged briefly from his coffin today in order to warn that both the Ukrainian and Middle East crises could upset the “eurozone recovery” which of course as we all know was proceeding at Full Ahead Both until f**king Putin and those f**king Jews put a spanner in the works.

Anyway, Draghi’s ECB will disclose the results in late October of its new stress test, following which troubled lenders will have only two weeks to come up with a plan to raise new capital. The Brussels line is that the test represents ‘a broad attempt to uncover hidden problems, force weak banks to rebuild their capital buffers and remove doubts about the stability of the eurozone financial system’ hahahahahahahaaa.

As an Italian, of course, Mario will be concerned by the fact that his native land “has returned to recession”….a recession it never left, but thanks to completely bent data in March 2013 seemed to have mysteriously done so. It could be that his spirits have been buoyed by his own prediction that the moderate recovery will continue – despite unemployment remaining high, and a sizeable amount of unutilised capacity.

Mainly, however, one feels that all this adds up little more than the starting assumption at ATEOTD’s inception five years ago: IABATO…It’s all Bollocks, and that’s Official.