It seems the European Central Bank has bowed to the reality that it could not expect to make a profit on the Greek bonds it has been buying at knock-down prices, while private sector bondholders were being asked to take such a big hit.
The complicated arrangement for involving the ECB in the deal to cut the stock of Greek sovereign debt, now sketched out by the Wall Street Journal, is slightly different from the variants I discussed the other week.
When the financial markets started to perk up in the last few weeks of 2011 it was easy to see what was driving the turnaround: good economic news out of the US, and a shedload of cheap medium-term loans for banks from the European Central Bank.
Since then there has been more good news from the real economy - especially in the US but also the core Eurozone economies and the UK.
We used to read the IFS Green Budget to find all the unexploded bombs that were lurking in Britain's public finances.
There are fewer to find these days, because most of the big ones have already been detonated, either by the financial crisis or the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR). But today's report still has some interesting nuggets, even if it does take a while to find them in its (count them) 251 pages.
Anyone who listened to the main sessions in Davos could tell you the top two items now on the to-do list for European leaders: fixing the eurozone's financial firewall and finally sealing the deal on Greece.
But there's a second list I'd like to compile after a few days talking to senior leaders and business people here in the mountains. That's the list of fears, lurking on the sidelines, which could come back and bite us, but no-one wants publicly to confront.
George Osborne has just told me the government will not vote against Stephen Hester's bonus as a shareholder at the April AGM. Ed Miliband had thrown down the gauntlet on this today, but the chancellor has declined to pick it up.
He said it would be an inappropriate use of the government's 82% shareholding, just as it would have been inappropriate to intervene in setting the size of his bonus in the first place. The government made its views known to the board when they were in the process of setting it. And that's that.
I've been thinking about the lessons of this year's World Economic Forum in Davos for Radio 4's Today programme - including excerpts from interviews with financier George Soros and IMF chief Christine Lagarde, among others.
They are trying, really trying, to get that deal done to cut the value of Greek debt - one that accepts the new realities I described in my last post.
The key is that all sides now accept that, for the numbers to add up, the public sector has to take a hit. There's a limit to the losses that the private sector debt holders will accept, and they have reached it.
The time for reaching a Greek debt deal is fast running out. That's one thing everyone can agree on here in Davos.
But what's less often noticed is that the balance of power around the negotiating table has also shifted lately; against the Eurozone institutions and politicians who most want to see a deal, and in favour of the Greeks themselves.
Perhaps we should think of another word for it. In two and half years of "recovery", the UK economy has recovered only 45% of the output lost during the recession.
If today's GDP figures are right, we didn't recover any output at all in the fourth quarter of 2011 - we lost about £750m's worth (give or take).
For years Japan has been the great cautionary tale, of how not to recover from a financial crisis and of more than one 'lost decade'.
When the financial crisis hit America and Europe in 2008, policymakers were sure about one thing: they would avoid making the same mistakes as the Japanese.
He might be in Japan, but the chancellor is keeping one eye on the GDP figures back home.
I interviewed him in a slightly odd location earlier today - on an empty bullet train parked outside the main Tokyo rail depot. He admitted for the first time that the UK economy probably wasn't going anywhere either, at least in the fourth quarter of 2011.
After months of running back and forth to Brussels, you can see why the Chancellor would want to jump on a plane to Hong Kong. Next stop is Beijing - then I will catch up with him in Tokyo.
As Robert Peston has written, the "news" out of Hong Kong was that Mr Osborne is keen to get the city a big slice of the new booming offshore trade in the Chinese currency, the renminbi.
The S&P downgrades of France and other Eurozone governments were worse than many expected, but they were expected. What's most interesting, to me, is not the fact that S&P has done this, but the stated reason.
Why? Because, in essence, a major ratings agency has now joined the side of those who say fiscal austerity, as the central plank of the response to the eurozone crisis, is doing more harm than good.
More news from decimal point corner. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research has now produced its first estimate for UK growth in the last quarter of 2011: an increase of 0.1%.
If right, that would be smack in line with my rather safe forecast of a small number - positive or negative. More important, it would suggest that the UK grew by just 1% over the course of 2011, less than half as fast as the government and most other forecasters were hoping at the start of the year, and (it now turns out) less than half as fast as 2010.
I'm going to stick my neck out and make a forecast about next week's first estimate for growth in the final quarter of 2011. I confidently predict it will be a small number, and it will either have a "plus" sign in front of it or a "negative".
You might not think that last bit very helpful. But when you're talking about the GDP figures for a £1.4 trillion economy, whether the ONS thinks that Britain's national output is slightly larger than it was before, or slightly smaller, is less important when the basic reality is that the economy is not doing very much at all.
A reason to be 0.1% more cheerful, today, from the Office for National Statistics, which revised up our quarterly growth rate in the three months to September by exactly that amount.
Pedants will point out that the figure for the previous quarter was revised down, by 0.1% - meaning we are pretty much exactly where we thought we were.
It's "Merry Christmas from the ECB" today, but not, I fear, a happy and prosperous New Year.
The high take-up of the ECB's first three-year lending programme for Europe's banks provides a good reason for the financial markets to be cheerful, which I highlighted in my blog on Monday 12 December. As I said then, this new lending coupled with the reduction in bank reserve requirements and the wider range of assets that will be accepted as collateral makes it much less likely that a major financial institution will run out of money in the very near future.
Stephanie has been a reporter at the New York Times (2001); a speech writer and senior advisor to the US Treasury Secretary (1997-2001); a Financial Times leader-writer and columnist (1993-7); and an economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies and London Business School.
She became BBC economics editor in April 2008.
She has won numerous awards, including the 2010 Harold Wincott Award for online journalism.
Her father was Michael Flanders, of the 1950s and '60s musical comedy duo, Flanders and Swann.
She lives in West London with her partner and their two children.
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