The center-right New Democracy (ND) party and the Coalition of the Radical Left, known as Syriza, are in a dead heat in the run-up to Sunday's Greek legislative elections. Despite ND's desire to keep the country in the eurozone, the party's campaign talk may be too little, too late. Supposing a Syriza win, the scenarios for Greece, and for Europe, grow dark, quickly.

News accounts often anticipate that political decisions (especially bad ones) will spell trouble in the market for government debt. In the short term, they will. But such fluctuations don't universally translate into long-term devaluations nor do they necessarily constrain governments.

Two years, three sovereign bailouts, more than a trillion euros in cheap ECB loans, and dozens of summits later, the latest developments in Germany suggest that Berlin is moving to solve the continent's crisis. But the country’s idea of a solution remains a system in which Berlin gets de facto and de jure veto power over national budgets in return for eurobonds. That misses the point: the crisis is not fiscal, but financial. It began, and it will end, with the banks.