For the Europeans here, this may be of interest, and ancillary to the "light at the end of the tunnel." For some reason I've been unable to copy and paste the article, here's a sample:

http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2009...

"Forex failure continues in Poland
Posted by Izabella Kaminska on Feb 16 21:43.

It's getting bleaker by the minute in Eastern Europe. In case you didn't catch the latest from the Telegraph's Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, he warned at the weekend how a growing crisis in Eastern Europe could cause nothing less than a total collapse in the West, or as he put it: "If one spark jumps across the euro zone line, we will have global systemic crisis within days."

To make his point Evans-Pritchard quotes Morgan Stanley's Stephen Jen on the fact that Eastern Europe has borrowed a total of $1,7oobn abroad. Furthermore about $400bn of that debt has to be rolled over this year - a number equivalent to about a third of the region's GDP.

As we outlined a couple of weeks ago, the concern is now greatest not for the retail mortgage sector, which practiced the issuance of foreign-currency based mortgages on a grand scale, but for corporates - which it appears practiced the art of derivative forex exposure on an even grander scale.

And so it comes as no surprise on Monday that yet another corporate forex failure has occurred in Poland, this time at Polski koncern Miesny Duda, a Polish meatpacking business. The stock sank to a record low on the news."