Have I got a deal for you! It's a 10-year Treasury bond that yields 10%! There's no risk. It's backed by the full faith and credit of the government!

There's just one detail. The government backing this treasury bond is the government of Greece.

I admit it, the Greek government hasn't had exactly a great track record repaying its debt. Greece has been an independent nation for about 180 years, and its government has been in various kinds of default on its debt for about 60% of the time.

But really, this time is different. Wait -- did I really say that?

Maybe it actually is. This time Greece isn't just a little rinky-dink country with some cool ruins and some pretty islands. It's part of the European Union. Its currency isn't some third-world waste-paper anymore. It's the euro -- the same currency used by Germany and France.

So what could go wrong? Apparently everything could. People are saying that Treasury bond yields don't hit 10% unless something is going very, very wrong. As you know, there's lots of talk that Greece will default, because of its high debts and deficits, and be ejected from the European Union. Some very famous investment gurus are saying all that.

But I say otherwise. I say buy those Greek bonds at 10%.

Having 10-year bonds yielding 10% doesn't mean you're going out of business as a nation. In the United States, our Treasury bonds yielded over 10% as recently as October 1987. OK, there was a little stock market crash then -- which lasted one whole day. We weren't going out of business in October 1987. In fact, that was right at the beginning of a huge economic boom that lasted better than 20 years.

Our 10-year Treasury bonds were trading above 9% as recently as May 1990. If the world ended then, I guess I missed it.

In fact, seems to me that when the world came close to ending -- two years ago -- our Treasury yields were nice and low! Our 10-year yielded 3.5% the day Lehman Brothers went belly-up. And as the crisis deepened, the yields went down, not up.

So I'm not scared of high yields. But more fundamentally, I have a theory about the way the world works now. I'm convinced that, after Lehman Brothers, for all the brave talk about ending the policy of "too big to fail," the reality is that no government anywhere is ever going to let anyone fail ever again.

That policy actually started before Lehman taught the world how bad the failure of even a third-rate investment bank can be. I think it started with Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Remember, just one year earlier, George W. Bush had been re-elected by a landslide. Then after his administration was seen as slow and sloppy in rescuing New Orleans, it was all downhill for him. He became universally despised as uncaring and incompetent.

Never mind that it was really a stupid idea to build a city below sea level to begin with. The political reality is that no elected leader wants blood on his hands from standing back and letting people take responsibility for their bad decisions.

And make no mistake about it, if Greece really does default on its debt, there will be blood. The least of the worries will be with Greece itself. According to Greece's central bank, Greek banks hold about $51 billion of Greek government debt. If there's a default, that wipes out bank capital at a time when, after the global credit crisis of last year, even the strongest banks can't afford to lose any capital. Believe me, Greek banks aren't the strongest.

There's a worse problem throughout the rest of Europe. According to the Bank for International Settlements, $188 billion of Greek government debt, about half the total, is held by banks in other European countries. France has $75 billion. Germany has $45 billion. The United Kingdom has $15 billion. A default would be a region-wide capital disaster.

Even the European Central Bank -- the equivalent of our Federal Reserve -- could be in trouble. It has made loans to banks throughout Europe against Greek government debt as collateral. What happens if that collateral turns out to be worthless? The ECB would return it to its member banks, and demand better collateral, or the money back. What would happen if the member banks couldn't comply?

All the worse if a Greek default shatters confidence in other economically weak European nations -- especially Portugal, Italy and Spain. European banks hold a total of $2.3 trillion in those four troubled countries. France alone has about a third of that. If all four go down, they take France with them.

You're probably thinking why, if the situation is so bleak, is Luskin saying we should buy Greek bonds for a lousy 10%?

For one thing, if Europe goes down, the whole world goes down. It'll be a replay of the 2008 global credit crisis on a larger scale, with the world already weakened by the first crisis. So you might as well try to make 10%, because if that happens we'll all be dead anyway.

But that's not my true reasoning. I believe that the more horrible the scenario we can tell ourselves, the less likely that the scenario will actually happen. Remember, when you can see that you're going to drive your car into a tree unless you turn away, you turn away. It's when you can't see the tree that you're in trouble. Believe me, all the authorities see this tree. They will turn away.

There will be a bailout. In fact, one was announced three weeks ago. There weren't a lot of details, and apparently nobody believes it will really take place. But it was announced by the leaders of the EU and the European Central Bank. They see the tree. They're already turning.

So buy that Greek debt at 10%. In a couple weeks, the panic will pass, and it will be down to 6%. You'll be glad you locked in a decade of a great yield.