Hello, I'm Helen Joyce, the finance editor of the Economist.

Welcome to Money Talks.

Coming up on the programme, Italy and Crisis, how severe is the threat to the Eurozone?

As soon as in one of these Eurozone countries on the edge, you start wondering about

whether or not they're really committed to the project, well then everyone starts worrying

and it can unfortunately become a

self-fulfilling prophecy. And in defense of liberalism, we talk to the author of

radical markets. Liberalism has a interesting way of finding its most creative new directions at precisely the moments when it seems to be most discredited.

First, the political crisis in Italy with an interim government and the prospect of elections as early as September

is causing severe jitters in financial markets.

European stock markets weakened today and a sell-off of Italian bonds deepened.

Investors are worried that the confrontation in Italy between

populists and the old political order could knock the whole Eurozone.

Henry Kerr, our economics editor, is on the line.

Henry, Italy has been a bit of a political and economic mess for really quite a long time.

How destabilising is this latest problem?

Well, Italy has run up large debts.

It's got public debts for about 131% of GDP,

which is very large by most rich country's standards,

especially in the Eurozone, where countries like

Italy, of course do not control their own currencies.

So that makes it a bit different from countries like Japan,

...