On one hand, I really hate the Economist. It's a magazine that thinks an ideology, a smart tone, and providing the only decent coverage of world events widely available makes for a compelling magazine. Even if that coverage is ridiculously biased and not really knowledgeable about facts on the ground.
On the other, it's perhaps the pre-eminent mouthpiece for the ruling Anglo-American elite, and it's comforting that they're sounding the alarms to what's happening. I think it's too little too late, but I genuinely hope that people and policymakers hear them.
Because this is really bad, folks. Really, really bad. It's pretty clear the dominoes that will fall: Greece fails, setting off markets and destroying banks across the continent, causing Spain to fail, doing the same, causing Italy, Belgium, maybe even France to fail. Who knows what after that. The EU's demise will signal the financial collapse of an economy larger than the United States; it's already either at the brink or already in a new recession, and this will be the deathblow. The quick succession of collapses, happening all within the span of a month or two, reverberate throughout the entire world, throwing the USA back into a second, possibly harsher recession than the first we have yet to recover from.
The only other solution is converting the European Union into a fiscal union. On the face of it this is implausible: you'd be asking Germans, who in their self imagination see themselves as pure as snow, to pony up hundreds of billions of dollars to subsidize what they see as the lavish lifestyles of lazy unproductive Mediterranean types. Even if you could form some political consensus to do this, though, it's not even clear that politicians could coordinate the solution in time to cut off the collapse. Effectively consolidating dozens of countries into the same fiscal union isn't a change you can implement by sheer willpower; it'd be a herculean task even with years of preparation.
And, stateside, any attempt to counteract or prepare for this tidal wave is simply doomed because of our ridiculously broken institutions. One side has the ability to co-operate and try to fix the situation, but because of how our government is set up all the incentives on their side are to actively sabotage the economy--regardless of causes, if it does badly, the party of the current President will be blamed.
Because people (Americans, Germans, Greeks, Chinese) are all idiots, from the man on the street to the upper echelons of power.