The biggest single danger in the eurozone crisis now is that events are moving too fast for Europe’s complacent political leadership. Last week, the crisis reached Italy. And the European Union looked the other way.

It was a huge mistake to postpone an emergency EU summit until Thursday this week. The European Council should by now have doubled or trebled the size of the European financial stability facility, the rescue umbrella. It should have made the facility more flexible, allowing it to buy bonds in the secondary markets. The council should have forced a closure of the debate on how to handle private investors, who bought Greek sovereign bonds.

Instead, the council allowed its finance ministers to get stuck in tedious technical details, unable to take a decision. Angela Merkel said there was no need for a summit right now. The German chancellor did what she has been doing throughout the crisis: hiding behind procedure. And since last Friday’s stress tests for banks was another cynical exercise in obfuscation, the council will need to take the first steps to sort out the banking mess at eurozone level. It will not. The crisis is moving too fast. Within a few weeks, the necessity moved from plan A to plan B to plan C. Plan A was austerity. Plan B acknowledges the need for debt relief, through some combination of a fiscal transfer and a contribution by bondholders. Plan C would widen the EFSF umbrella, to make it big enough to shelter Spain and Italy.