Europe realizes their banks were screwing around.

EU: First blame the Americans only to realize your vaunted banks were eager to loan out money like fools. So suck on it Europe!

As European taxpayers absorbed the rapidly escalating expense of bank bailouts, lawmakers on the continent toned down their criticism of Wall Street as the origin of the problem and started to blame their own lenders for gorging on subprime loans and other risky investments. "What were they doing screwing around in the United States?" French President Nicolas Sarkozy reportedly asked his aides after he was forced to negotiate a $9.2 billion emergency bailout Monday for Dexia, the troubled Franco-Belgian bank. He has invited the leaders of Germany, Britain, Italy and Luxembourg for an emergency meeting in Paris this weekend. Feuding is already starting to break out in the 27-nation European Union over the best course to take. British bankers on Wednesday called Ireland's surprise step to guarantee bank deposits an unfair competitive step; signs emerged, too, of German-French disagreements on bailout strategy. Until recently, officials in many European countries bragged that they were relatively well insulated from the global credit crisis by what they described as superior regulatory oversight. But with a string of banks pleading for rescues in the past week, officials have begun to acknowledge that their rules were insufficient. In Germany, most of the banks that have teetered on insolvency in recent months have been state-owned regional institutions. Duesseldorf-based WestLB, for instance, received a $7.8 billion bailout in April. On Wednesday, E.U. regulators said they would review that rescue to ensure it did not give the bank unfair competitive advantages. Although Germany's state-owned banks have suffered for years from other problems, the credit crisis has exposed the degree to which they willingly made risky bets outside the country. "Regulations on this side of the Atlantic have not been perfect," said Reinhard Buetikofer, co-chairman of the Greens, a German opposition party. "For a while, a large segment of the public considered all this as innocent German banks caught in an American mess. . . . Only recently has the public started to understand how much we are involved, and how much of this has been our doing, too."