Perhaps I haven't fully comprehended your previous posts about leverage, but something has been puzzling me for a while. With all this incestuous lending between financial institutions is it not possible for Party A to say to Party B, "Listen up. I have your debt and you have mine. Let's exchange so that we can say 'Bang! And the dirt is gone.'. What do you say?"

Bringing my other brain cell on line, I can see that mutual destruction of negative numbers does not address the issue of valuing the assets, so the problem may be that Party A and Party B cannot decide how far below zero to go.

Now I can't get 'Yes Minister' out of my head.

Bad mistake. Used an old 2003 figure. Sorry. the total is less these day s but figures vary so much that I have opted for the cheesey option of "tens of trillions". I hate those meaningless generalisations but exagerationis wore.

Sorry mate.

Thanks again.

Then there really is no fixing it – is there?