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So you know, everyone points out Greece's default record, but the history of a lot of sovereign nations is not a good one when it comes to lending them money.

The rating agencies historically actually did a pretty good job rating regular bonds.

And so we have to be careful with looking at additional stimulus that we don't provoke an increase in the bond rate and then offset a lot of the stimulus we've already got.

Well what would happen is that if Greece defaulted and couldn't pay its debts, all the Greek bonds that are held in other banking systems across Western Europe would suddenly have no value. You could as a knock-on effect create a banking crisis in Western Europe.

It would be helpful if someone would lay out exactly the economic mechanism that gets us from yet lower interest rates to actual economic activity.

Blaming speculators as a response to financial crisis goes back at least to the Greeks. It's almost always the wrong response.

Italians have always had a high savings rate. They love putting their money into their own government bonds - even more than in houses, stocks and gold. The higher rates climb, the happier they are to invest. So if austerity plans drive rates up, it's music to Italian ears.

The Great Inflation of the 1970s destroyed faith in paper assets, because if you held a bond, suddenly the bond was worth much less money than it was before.

Rising interest rates are considered bad for stocks because they raise the cost of doing business and depress corporate earnings and because higher yields make bonds relatively more attractive than stocks to investors.

Greece's European neighbors were able step in and bolster the weak foundation on which Greece's free-spending budget was based. It would be difficult for any country, or intergovernmental organization, to rescue an economy the size of the U.S. if investors were ever to lose faith in our bonds because of our enormous debt.