The problem is that Italy's biggest banks are midgets compared with the largest in Germany, France and Britain.

ECONOMIST: Italian banking

They're just a lot of, you know, something for everybody and they contained a little bit of everything, really: you know, guys in masks and beautiful women in skimpy costumes and evil villains and sports cars, lounge lizard numbers, midgets.

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All the same, the proportional system for choosing a quarter of the seats, which allowed so many of those midgets to get into the last parliament, is still untouched, storing up instability for a time when the balance of power between the big blocks once again becomes more delicate.

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