The Tobin Tax, or Financial Transaction Tax, is controversial within the EU - Britain says it won't sign up for an EU wide levy - and within German Chancellor Angela Merkel's right-wing coalition government where the minority partners, the FDP, are against the idea.

But according to an article in today's Suddeutsche Zeitung, Merkel is now throwing her weight behind a Tobin Tax.

The new Italian Prime Minister told the Financial Times that it was in Germany's "own enlightened self-interest" to help Italy and the other heavily indebted countries of the euro zone periphery to lower their borrowing costs.

Monti, a technocrat appointed to replace Silvio Berlusconi, praised Germany's "culture of stability" as "a precious German product [that] has been marvelously exported.”

You may have thought the Greek crisis was pretty much over. After all the headlines from last November were: Greek bondholders agree to take a haircut and the country's Prime Minister George Papandreou resigns to be replaced by a technocrat named Lucas Papademos, who is more congenial to the needs of the EU's leadership in Brussels, and more important, to German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

But as focus shifted to Italy and now to France, the Greek situation has remained bogged down in details. This week Greece's creditors in banks and hedge funds (not necessarily interested in the same outcome) plus representatives of the "Troika" (EU, IMF and European Central Bank) descend on Athens for an intensive round of negotiations with the Greek government.

Larry Elliott at The Guardian has the best line of the day on the event. "It is international finance's version of Sartre's Huis Clos, a vision of hell where three people who loathe each other are stuck in a room for eternity."

There is probably no riskier form of behavior for a blogging journalist than to claim that a corner has been turned in solving the euro zone's debt crisis but two weeks into the New Year it feels like something has changed - and changed for the better.

It may be a moment akin to something in an episode of ER where the patient is in the emergency room and the crash carts have been deployed and vital signs have stabilized and the family - you and me and everybody in the world who understands that a euro crash will mean Great Depression MkII - are taking a deep breath, sipping tepid coffee, and feeling tentatively hopeful that the patient will make it.