When everybody has a cash-flow problem, who is the true sugar daddy?

Even though the focus has, particularly for us Americans, been on the slugfest surrounding US insolvency (let's be candid here), noises emanating from across the Atlantic about how Spain and Italy were joining Greece and Portugal as sinking ships among the fleet known as the EU were becoming more frequent. 
Now it's having the effect of holistic decay on the continent that gave us Western civilization.  In a stinging bit of irony, India is going to contribute $2 billion to Europe's leading-edge economic failures.
Are there sufficient bright spots anywhere in the world's economic picture to mitigate the theme of deterioration that is clearly emerging?
All of which takes me back to that first of my economic laws: The money has to come from somewhere.
I sometimes think that the plethora of too-wonkish-by-half schemes and charts and graphs for a given state, nation or continent to climb out of its debt morass is deliberately designed to make everyone's eyes glaze over, so that the observer's intellect is short circuited and he, in his mental exhaustion, decides to believe that the IMF or the Tooth Fairy has a magic solution.
Numbers really aren't so abstract.  Wealth that is floating around in bond, stock and commodities markets, or sequestered in corporate retained-earnings accounts, or being digested and eliminated by welfare states for spreading on the parched soils of their populaces, originated in some nexus of raw material and human ingenuity.  That's the only incubator in which wealth is ever brought forth.
Perhaps a general collapse would clear the field and make possible the kind of micro-entrepreneurship celebrated by Hernando de Soto, unburdened by licensing, byzantine credit arrangements and other bureaucratic hooha.
If that kind of convulsion and catharsis can be averted, though, I think it's universally agreed that that's a good thing.  Personally, I'd like to exist free of interruptions to my food and energy supply.
I don't think some degree of a smack upside the head can be avoided, though.  Too many in positions to craft and implement policy in this world still don't understand a basic truism that this freelance writer and jazz guitarist who never took an economics course in college (much to the consternation of my econ-major father) formulated based on observation and experience.

The money has to come from somewhere.