from 60 percent to 65 percent of GDP, and French debt from 59 to 64 percent.) Even during the recession itself, whilst deficits elsewhere rocketed into double figures, Italy's peaked at 5.4 percent in 2009 (less than France's 7.5 percent). Neither did Italy use the period of the euro to run-up large household debts or expand its banking sector massively, as happened elsewhere. By 2007 Italian household debt was only about 30 percent of GDP (vs around 60 percent in Germany, nearly 70 percent in the UK, and around 80 percent in Ireland, Spain and Portugal). Whilst the UK, Ireland, Belgium and the Netherlands all have banking sectors of 350-450 percent of GDP, the Italian banking sector is one of the smallest, relative to GDP, in the eurozone, at only around 150 percent of GDP (only around the same size as Finland's). Thus Italy is not like Ireland in being over-committed to a large banking sector or running up large household debts. It is not like Greece in allowing its deficit to spiral out of control. It is not even like Belgium or Portugal in having an unfortunate mix of fairly high deficit and fairly large banking sector problems. Italy does, of course, face issues of political strife and corruption. (And in other news, the sun rose again this morning...). But it is most mysterious why one should believe that these problems would on this occasion induce default when they didn't, say, during the 1990s? Greece will default -- for