Cantillon: Greece gets best friend in wily Noonan

As Greece and its euro-zone partners inch towards a deal this week, Moody's issued a report yesterday looking at what a Greek exit might mean for the European banking sector.

While they conclude that overall euro-area banks are better prepared to weather such a scenario than at the height of the euro area crisis, they also note that banks in other periphery countries – Cyprus, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain – remain vulnerable in the event of an exit.

Peripheral country banks will be more susceptible to restricted market access and the higher cost of wholesale funding that will be the inevitable price of Greece defaulting and leaving the euro zone.

It was a reminder – if anyone really needed it – that despite all the posturing of recent months a Greek exit would be an unmitigated disaster for the euro zone.

It would be particularly unfortunate for the smaller countries such as Ireland which have endured austerity, albeit not as much as the Greeks.

None of this is lost on Minister for Finance Michael Noonan, who has emerged as the best – if not only – friend of Greece's minister for finance, Yanis Varoufakis at the negotiating table.

The two men seem to have found common ground over the rather limited role given to elected politicians in European negotiations of this sort.

The interesting question is whether Noonan’s intervention to that effect last week – as cited by Varoufakis – was a deliberate attempt to support Greece at this crucial juncture without being seen to endorse their headbanging style of negotiation.

Noonan is a wily politician and the second-longest serving finance minister in the euro zone.

But is he really that crafty?