John Micklethwait

Let's come back to the average Greek in a second.

You just mentioned fiscal discipline.

You look at the core of Europe.

I sat down with Prime Minister Sanchez of Spain the other day as well.

Something dramatic has changed.

Greece, Spain, you're the countries growing really fast.

In the middle, you've got countries in much greater trouble.

You look at France.

You're growing, let me know, over 2%.

They're struggling to get to half a percent of growth.

Their debt is ballooning.

Are we now in a situation where you would worry about financial contagion from France?

You're a famously polite man, and I know that schadenfreude is not a Greek word, it's a German one, but there must be some element in Greece of looking at these people who nearly push Greece out and thinking, well, things have changed.

One of the areas where Europe has been pretty useless at doing these things is banking, the banking union and things like that.

Italy's Unicredit has built up a stake in Alfa Bank, which you were famously much more relaxed about than the Germans were when they built up one in Commerzbank.

Would you be prepared if they were to take over Alfa Bank?

Would you be relaxed about that?

But as you said earlier, that's the kind of problem with Europe at the moment.

Most people are taking these decisions on, I suppose, purely nationalist or that kind of level.

You look around Europe at the moment, the ability to create common things like a banking union, that's the real problem at the moment.