David Ignatius offers two cheers for Mario Draghi, the head of the ECB, for giving away super-cheap money to bankers. These pundits love their banking daddies, don’t they? Ignatius does realize, however, that the real problems in Europe are beside the point of the banking debt crisis. The problem is he thinks the real problem is the lack of an enforceable fiscal union.

The Federal Reserve did not only vow to maintain a zero interest-rate policy through the end of 2014 (a policy that has its critics, incidentally). They also set an explicit interest rate target for the first time ever, as far as I can tell.

They completely missed a catastrophic bubble that had disastrous consequences for the nation. Banks and lenders were making money so they preferred not to see the problems that lie ahead. By 2006 the bubble already showed signs of popping, and still Fed policymakers were tragically ignorant.

If European banks need $154 billion in cash to meet new capital requirements and backstop losses on sovereign debt, and investors are unlikely to be a source for raising cash, then banks really have nowhere else to turn except their national governments. And that may get problematic in a hurry.

The 17 countries of the Eurozone formally backed a new deal for fiscal management, one designed to “save the euro” but which can only help if a host of other measures fall into place, including any plan to actually boost growth on the southern periphery.

We have a better sense of the situation in Europe, or at least the game being played by Angela Merkel and the European Central Bank, in tandem. Merkel and the ECB, before acquiescing to any scheme involving Eurobonds or running the printing presses, want to tighten fiscal integration among Eurozone countries, with the attendant loss of national sovereignty and real penalties for breaking fiscal guidelines.

Six central banks took coordinated action to ensure liquidity for the global banking system. The European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the central banks of Canada, Japan and Switzerland will provide lending of dollars to banks to ensure they can cover operations.

As the Euro crisis remains unsolved, Europe is slipping into recession. The elites’ prescription for this, sadly, is more austerity. All we’re hearing are trial balloons about the IMF rescuing Italy, which have since been shot down. But that would be the ECB funding the IMF, in all likelihood, which it hasn’t agreed to do.

Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian leader whose government fell with pushing from Germany, France, and the central bankers, is now plotting his comeback but making sense: he’s saying the European Central Bank needs to do its job or the whole Eurozone will collapse — and he’s probably right.

In Spain, the Popular Party led by Mariano Rajoy scored a victory over the Socialists, due in no small part to the crisis ravaging the country with high unemployment and a collapsing housing market. But the new government is wedded to the same austerity policies that have already tanked the Spanish economy.