For a start, the plan will not begin until mid-2015 at the earliest. The extra spending that it hopes to engender will then be spread over three years. Furthermore, most of Mr Juncker’s €315 billion is based on financial engineering, using public guarantees of small sums in the hope of leveraging in a lot more private capital—some of which would have been lent anyway to other projects. Even the €16 billion that is being touted as “new money” is illusory; almost all of it is being recycled from unspent bits of the EU budget. Another chunk comes from that hardy perennial, expansion of the European Investment Bank (EIB), but this institution is notoriously slow and cautious about any risky projects.