Spot the difference edition.

Then, as advised in a recent paper by Lee Buchheit, Mitu Gulati, and Ignacio Tirado — which we’re revisiting as Cyprus bailout talks heat up — stop reading here.

The FT’s Peter Spiegel has seen a proposal from the European Commission that throws yet more doubt, if such a thing is even possible, on the seriousness of the June 29 eurozone statement that recognised “the imperative to break the vicious circle between banks and sovereigns”.

In a statement, the ratings agency blamed… France, whose own Aaa rating it cut last week:

A senior official within the Spanish ministry of economy said Spain did not require any money from the European Stability Mechanism, the eurozone’s state rescue fund, but would be comfortable making a request for a credit line only in order to satisfy the conditions of the ECB to begin buying bonds.

Ahead of all that we wanted to talk you through a quick recap of the latest developments because, as UBS strategist Justin Knight rightly points out, “the areas of concern are now becoming numerous” and it’s making the question of when Spain might request aid increasingly complex.

The divisions over whether the ESM should shoulder the burden of existing impaired bank assets is a serious one, and could get worse. It reflects the problems of the key European Summit in June, which set the parameters for the progress the region has since made. The Summit communiqué bridged disagreement about whether burden sharing should happen – but it achieved this largely by being incoherent. The periphery (Ireland in particular) went away convinced that they could socialise the debt burden they had incurred by supporting their domestic banking systems, that bank recapitalization payments could take effect in the near-term and be applied to existing troubled assets. The core countries went away thinking that they had committed to no such thing, but that work should be done to disentangle sovereign-banking sector feedback loops in the future institutional design of the region. This misunderstanding reflects the danger of mixing the discussion of tactical issues – how to deal with the current Irish or Spanish debt burden – from strategic issues, like Germany’s desire to build a new permanent architecture for EMU. It also reflects the dangers of trying to reach complex agreements at 4.00am.