Staggering to the rescueEurope’s troubled banks and broke governments are in a dangerous embrace

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IT HAD seemed a simple enough wheeze. Give banks unlimited access to 3-year funding from the European Central Bank and it wouldn’t take much more than a nudge and a wink for them to buy the bonds of Europe’s troubled peripheral countries instead of having the ECB do the job itself. For those too dull to read between the lines, Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president, spelled it out: “each state can turn to its banks, which will have liquidity at their disposal.”
The wheeze, however, seems to have been too clever by half. Hours after Mr Sarkozy was urging banks to bail out governments, the European Banking Authority (EBA) released the results of its updated stress tests showing that European banks need to raise