Spanish Flu...

For much of the hand wringing over Greece, the numbers involved were never large enough to seriously threaten the entire global financial edifice. A Greek meltdown would have likely infected the rest of the planet with the economic equivalent of a bad cold. But debt contagion emanating from Spain could be that country’s most dangerous export since the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-19 (which killed some 5 percent of the world’s population). If, as some have suggested, a Spanish crisis could lead to questions being raised about France’s economic health, the resultant fallout could be the global financial equivalent of pneumonia.