“There are about a thousand ways that Europe could fail,” says Doug Elliot, of the Brookings Institution. It was a constant theme in interviews with economists this past week: There are, at this point, more ways for Europe to fall apart than to stay together. In a sign of how quickly the situation is deteriorating, some analysts even became poetic. “An inch ahead lies darkness,” says Tom Gallagher, a partner at the Scowcroft Group, and a man who does not usually quote Japanese proverbs. Seeing more than an inch ahead on the European debt crisis is, right now, difficult. But in conversations with analysts, economists ... (full story)