Today the Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/european-debt-crisis-greek-bailout-talks-are-complicated-by-looming-deadline/2012/02/15/gIQAsLIXGR_story.html) is reporting “As European leaders haggled Wednesday over how and whether to keep Greece from spinning into uncontrolled bankruptcy next month, one factor was not negotiable: the sheer passage of time, which is complicating efforts to ease Greece’s debts.

With each day, the plans to relieve the debts grow more difficult to pull off by the end of March, when Greece faces a mammoth payment that it cannot meet without help. Acknowledging the uncertainty, European finance officials discussed Wednesday night the possibility of delaying the bailout until after Greek elections scheduled for April and helping Greece make its $19 billion payment in the meantime, according to an official briefed on the talks, which were held by conference call.

It’s all a bad tv sitcom series that won’t go away!

Fears of a spreading European debt crisis also weighed on markets. Italian
bank stocks plunged and trading in some of them was halted after Moody’s warned
that it might downgrade their credit ratings.

Friday’s decline erased all of this week’s gains for the Dow Jones
industrial average and S&P index. The broad stock market has now fallen for
seven of the last eight weeks, largely because of concerns that the U.S.
economy is slowing and that Europe’s debt problems may lead to another
financial crisis. The S&P 500 is down 7 percent since it hit a high for the
year on April 29.