As I wrote on Thursday (and repeat in a 'rapid response' to City AM this morning), the deal reached by EU leaders last week doesn't change a thing. Here's Detlev Schlichter on the ongoing crisis:

"The problems around the world are essentially the same. After decades of ongoing and generous expansion of the fiat money supply, of artificially low interest rates and cheap credit, banks are hopelessly overextended, asset markets are distorted, and sovereign states are bust. I sometimes get pushback on the last point. Are they really bust? – Yes, most of them are. They have acquired debt loads and spending habits – now very deep-rooted and practically impossible to eradicate – that require constant new borrowing at fairly low interest rates – cheap credit forever. Obviously, that is not going to happen. The end of the forty-year credit boom has arrived. The private sector is no longer playing ball.

"What needs to happen? The overextended credit edifice needs to be cut back to a size that is commensurate with the underlying pool of real voluntary savings and with underlying real income streams. Money printing and the constant attempt to manipulate lending rates down have to stop. The market has to finally be allowed to set interest rates that reflect the true cost of available savings, and to liquidate what is not sustainable. Deleveraging, default, and debt deflation are necessary to bring the economic structure back into balance. Is this painful? – You bet. It is also unavoidable. There is no other solution. Yet, the solution is deemed politically unacceptable and it is thus being fought tooth and nail. Not only in the US and the UK, also in Europe.

"The entities that are most under stress in this scenario are the banks and the debt-addicted states. You know my forecast: the central banks will be asked to underwrite the states and the banks directly with the help of the printing press on an ever-larger scale, and this will ultimately lead to higher inflation and finally to paper money collapse: the end of our present fiat money system, the latest experiment in the sad history of unlimited and fully elastic state money systems."

Read the whole thing or, better still, buy Detlev's book. You can also watch his recent Adam Smith Institute lecture here.