southern european countries have much higher debt liabilities than germany so let's bring in having furcal is a senior economist and director at the hamburg institute of international economics who coauthored this study any year warning about these high levels of debt what would happen and if it indeed thinkable that any of these economies can default. yeah i think so this problem has been overlooked so far by markets but we have seen that in the aftermath of the global financial crisis in two thousand and seven and eight sovereign debt ratios has increased by almost thirty percentage points to over one hundred percent of g.d.p. so now we face a situation where a dad overhang is combined with monetary policy operating at the lower zero bone but now we are at the beginning of a global economic downturn and interest rate increases so this problem can increasingly become a huge problem for the global economy so and in the situation we have with a lot of uncertainty on the markets this could easily lead to kind of contagion among other major economies really you know believe that we're actuall