Your humble overseas correspondent has been telling you that while the US economy is bad, the EU is far worse. Of course, the USA has a full compliment of banal and obsequious politicians, but we have nothing to compare to the preening EU bureaucrats in Brussels. It is like having a government of John Edwards and Obama clones who would rather worry whether there is proof that water actually, you know, hydrates, your cucumber’s shape is just too irregular or it is too dangerous to allow kids to blow up balloons without adult supervision than deal with the debt bomb that faces them.

There is a game of “hot potato” going on over here where countries are tossing bad debt back and forth between them to see who gets caught holding it when the music stops… It is a house of cards, an empire built of matchsticks…

Apparently Royal Dutch Shell agrees:

Royal Dutch Shell is pulling some of its funds out of European banks over fears stirred by the euro zone’s mounting debt crisis, The Times reported on Monday.

The company’s chief financial officer Simon Henry told the newspaper that Shell is cutting back its exposure to European credit risk in the worst-hit economies and putting a higher price on doing business with the region’s peripheral nations.

“There’s been a shift in our willingness to take credit risk in Europe. The crisis has impacted our willingness to afford credit,” Henry is quoted as saying.

Henry is cited as saying that the Anglo-Dutch oil major would rather deposit $15 billion of cash in non-European assets, such as U.S. Treasuries and U.S. bank accounts.