Could a financial crisis engulf Europe?

If you're worried about the close connection between negative household savings in the United States and world economic instability, you need look no further than the ‘sub-prime lending' crisis of 2007, an instructive lesson in how quickly a set of apparently unrelated factors can combine to produce the threat of financial meltdown.

Earlier this month small savers in the UK queued up 1930s-style outside the branches of Northern Rock, one of Britain's many building societies which (muc...