The weather in Davos has offered a perfect setting for this year’s World Economic Forum. Heavy snowfall has made simply keeping your footing a difficult challenge; one ill-timed misstep on the ice could easily send you head first into a snow drift. After the first day’s discussions, the business leaders and economists debating inside the town’s convention center seem to feel the same about the state of the world economy. One wrong move and we could find ourselves tumbling into something ugly. No one is walking on thinner ice than the leaders of the euro zone. With the debt crisis at the beginning of its third year, Europe still represents the most dangerous threat to global economic stability.

And the delegates here seem to be slipping into two camps about what might happen to the common currency this year. The Europe-has-it-all-together team claims that the leaders of the euro zone are taking the steps necessary for stabilizing the 17-nation euro – fiscal and structural reform in the weaker economies, liquidity support to avert defaults and banking failures, and the beginnings of long-term measures to stiffen the backbone of the union. Then there’s the we’re-still-heading-into-the-toilet group, which maintains the position that Europe continues to muddle through, pursuing expedient measures that are not tackling the underlying problems facing the euro zone, and, worse still, sending the region into a deadly death spiral. Which view proves correct could determine what happens to the global economy in 2012.