Germany's Angela Merkel, left, and France's François Hollande at the EU summit in Brussels.
With the eurozone crisis response slowing to a crawl, Friday’s early-morning agreement setting a timetable for a new single eurozone bank supervisor is probably best judged with textual analysis, since the deal is so incremental it’s hard to really judge without a close look at the details.
The key change between the communiqué agreed in June and the one agreed Friday is the firming up of when, exactly, the new supervisor, to be run by the European Central Bank, will start and how long it will take to be phased in. The June deal was immensely vague on this point:
We ask the Council to consider these proposals as a matter of urgency by the end of 2012.
Gideon Rachman and his FT colleagues debate international affairs on