Alan Kohler:

The Greek bailout is merely an exercise in wishful thinking — that, first, 95% of bondholders will accept it and second that Greece’s economy will return to growth sometime next year.

But it should get everyone past the March 20 bond rollover and perhaps even slow down the capital flight from Greece, and buy the authorities some time to deal with Portugal, and then Ireland and then …

But it needs to be remembered that this is, and always has been, primarily a banking problem and that the world remains in the grip of sustained bank deleveraging, similar to what kept Japan in depression for more than 10 years in the 90s and beyond.

And the bottom line is this:

Increasing bank leverage produced the boom of 2002-2007; decreasing bank leverage is doing the opposite, and still has years to run.

You have been warned…