It has been clear for some time what the outlines of a potential deal to save the euro would be.
But, contrary to what the more breathless newspaper headlines have suggested, there was no comprehensive deal on the table in Washington this weekend for ministers to discuss, let alone sign up to.
First things first: officials have, more or less, accepted the need for a bigger write-down of Greek debt and more capital for Europe's banks.
There are plenty of devilish details to sort out. But you can sort them out without requiring a major philosophical shift on the part of the European Central Bank (ECB) or Germany. All that is required is that eurozone leaders grasp the urgency of the situation, which, supposedly, they now do.
However, the same cannot be said of the proposals for the eurozone rescue fund, the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF). My bet is that this will happen, in some shape or form. But not without a fight. There is also the small problem that it might not be constitutional.
On the banks, Europeans had one good reason to hate the IMF's estimate of the losses banks had faced as a result of the crisis. In coming up with the 300bn-euros ($400bn; £260bn) figure, fund staff had added up all the "mark-to-market" losses which European banks would have made on their sovereign debt holdings for countries like Greece or Italy.
But, by design, the calculation did not take any account of the very large gains that had been made on the same banks' holdings of, say, British or German sovereign debt, whose value has soared over the same period (the counterpart of that dramatic fall in yields).
This was unfortunate. It gave eurozone ministers an excuse to quibble with the details of the IMF's analysis, instead of finally accepting the basic argument which the fund, the US and the UK have been making for over a year: Europe's banks need more capital. Arguably, they were under-capitalised even before the Greek crisis hit.
They need even more capital now. That much is now widely accepted by the Germans and pretty much everyone else. Again, the details of how to do it are tricky, and the amounts are disputed. But the principle has been agreed. It will happen.
Rescue fund
You might expect me to say the same about beefing up the EFSF; after all, didn't they already expand it once? But the change under discussion is not one of scale - it is one of design. And the design change gets to a fundamental question of principle about the bailouts which has dogged the eurozone's response to the crisis from day one.
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