Judgment daze

“IT'S an analyst's wet dream,” says one banker of the European stress tests announced on July 23rd. If financial detail is what turns you on, then the exercise delivered in style with hundreds of pages of information on 91 banks' solvency and their exposures to the bonds of under-siege governments in the euro zone. As a piece of organisation, if not quite a triumph, it was an impressive feat. But whether all that new disclosure or the tests' conclusion—that seven European banks need a piffling €3.5 billion ($4.5 billion) of new capital—help the banks escape their funding problems remains to be seen.