So S&P (and of course our special friends, the hedge funds) try to increase the pressure on Europe. Sixty years of peace in central Europe are enough anyway, and wasn't the Great War already a big correction system for the world's economic tensions? I'm sure that political economists of the future will know how to explain the things that are going to happen this year.

A good opportunity to ignore the absurdity of our era and to admire the simple but beautiful ceiling of St Vitus, when the economy was dependent on the emperor's whimsies alone.