The decision for Europe’s bosses is this: they must ultimately confront the consequences of their policy choices. They can destroy the eurozone by continuing with the same failed mix of policies or by salvaging it by adding what has been missing from the outset: a mechanism for shifting surpluses to the deficit regions in the form of productive investments (as opposed to handouts or loans)

Marshall Auerback suggests the Troika's goal in the Greek deal is to make the deal so miserable for the Greek people that the Spanish, Portuguese, Irish and Italians don't even begin to think of trying to get a similar haircut on their debt

Here's the latest story that's been getting buzz around the internet: banks are trying to get troubled mortgages off their books without having to go through costly foreclosure processes and they are offering homeowners cash incentives to do so

Great data from Bespoke. Looks like Portugal is the odd man out as the only government in which its CDS spreads have widened this year

Looks like there’s a storm brewing in the U.S. repo markets.

It figures: profit-center banks have every motivation to stay one step ahead of the regs and the pols. Since the gamekeepers have now gotten around to looking at proprietary trading and bringing derivatives onto exchanges, you can almost bet your first-born that the next crisis will be in neither one of these areas but someplace else entirely different

FX intervention is certainly in the air this week for Latin America. Brazil stands out as the most aggressive, of course, as the central bank intervened in the forward market Friday and in the spot market Monday

The latest Gallup poll shows the approval rating for Congress at a record low 10%. 86% disapprove

You saw the chart about two weeks ago on Developed economies’ debt levels by sector. Different economies have different debt problems. A few like Greece have public sector debt woes. And this is the sort of problem that forces a default only when the country is a currency user (and not a monopoly issuer of currency) as Japan has demonstrated. Mostly, however, the problem is in the private sector, where all of the indebted parties are currency users

Jim Rickards, author of Currency Wars, was on capital Account last night and he thinks both QE3 and war with Iran are distinct possibilities. Take a look

Jeremy Grantham’s investing strategies for 2012 – CBS News “Quality gave back a bit of its outperformance [in the fourth] quarter, but the game is in the early innings still,” GMO says in its latest report. “High quality stocks still trade at attractive levels, and the general defensive posture of quality still remains appealing given