The euro elites’ airy assurances that the biggest ‘I’ and the ‘S’ in PIIGS are merely supporting actors in the European debt drama are turning to dust and blowing away.

Italy and Spain can no more pay off their debts than Greece, and the markets are in no mood to wait for Athens to default before they start driving up Spanish and Italian borrowing costs.

Things are heading for a smash-up. The time-honoured ‘solution’ of inflicting cruel and unusual punishments upon the populace via the IMF won’t work in a world where unsustainable debt and the inability to grow economically are fully-globalised phenomena.

That won’t stop them trying it, of course, if only because the ship of fools is still fully staffed and run by the lunatic cadre of monetarist economists whose attitude to ordinary people resembles that of non-too-bright kids with sticks who’ve managed to tie a kitten to a tree by one of its back legs.

Indeed, things are so bad that it’s conceivable that Dominique Strauss-Khan decided to (almost literally) stiff his own career via a patently flimsy imbroglio in New York rather than preside over the unveiling of the IMF in its new guise as a bulldozer fashioned from wet cardboard.

Courtesy of the Internet Anagram Server, I can reveal exclusively to the blogosphere that Mr Strauss-Khan’s name can be rearranged into the spookily appropriate epithet: ‘Unashamed risk – quit, son’.

The risk in question is nothing to do with hotel chambermaids.