Another fun image from Europe (following this Economist cover earlier today) comes via this Spiegel report on the shadow banking system that seems to have recovered nicely from that little bobble in 2008.

After the experience of a few years ago (recall that both Greenspan and Bernanke said the banking system was sound in the years leading up to the crisis when all the bad stuff was happening in the shadow banking system), you’d think that you wouldn’t be reading things like this in 2012, but you are:

But banks, regulators, politicians and economists are worried about the parallel universe that has developed beyond the major banks.