To paraphrase the historian Thomas Carlyle, a debt crisis is a quarrel between politicians too cowardly to fight their own battle. Unfortunately, the common investor is the one facing the collateral damage despite encouraging corporate fundamentals.

Initially, the sovereign crisis seemed to be put on hold. On Tuesday, an 11th-hour deal between the Democrats and the Republicans averted a full scale US debt crisis, while nine days earlier their European counterparts stuck a band-aid on an increasingly gangrenous Greek debt problem. But on Wednesday, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso warned that the crisis looks set to spread beyond the eurozone.