The news was one of those instances when you could see they were trying a little too hard. It didn’t make any sense, not anyway in the context to which it was delivered. On September 21, unnamed German officials were supposedly championing a megamerger in the banking sector. The country’s two largest financial institutions might be brought together to save Germany.

Huh?

Just talking about Commerzbank and its bigger compatriot Deutsche Bank is fraught with nervous energy. It was a bit too cute, however, in that officials are trying to argue that it makes sense to do this now so that the combined whole would supposedly keep the German economy liquid during the next downturn (far off into the future, of course). A matter of prudent planning, you see.

Sure, a bank whose stock was down more than 35% for the year at that point, which had lost 76% of its value since January 2014, this was the firm to which everyone else would anchor so that everything would be fine for the next crisis? That trial balloon could not have been more transparent nonsense.

Deutsche Bank’s shares had been on something of an upswing before the news, but have cratered to new lows after.

Three days before that fun, Moody’s had put an interesting twist on international funding. The ratings company admitted what pretty much everyone had figured out by then. India’s biggest shadow financier was creating enormous and unappreciated (perhaps unaccountable) risks for the entire Indian money system.

One particular asset challenge for banks in a potential IL&FS default comes from the company’s complex corporate structure, which could result in high variation of ultimate losses across banks depending on where the banks’ specific exposures lie.

The shadow player is turning out to be a lot like other firms which had previously achieved similar infamy. They are deep and complex, and you can’t always tell how their increasingly likely downfall will play out beyond the specific company’s own reach. IL&FS hadn’t been designated a systemically important financial institution (SIFI) but the way India’s government has been reacting to the affair doesn’t require this one kind of official stamp.