Hello, I took the external debt of the first 197 countries mainly from the cia world factbook. On this, for France, the external debt is 4698 billion dollars (US). As far as I know that debt has to take into account the total amount of debt that the government, public and local authorities owes. I know that Monaco and Luxembourg are places where there are a lot of banks, yes this is true. But the reasoning I made is in absolute terms, facts that for many of them like USA, the principal debitor is a country like China. I think that, if a country like Ireland, Greece or any important one is going bankrupt then it will pull the others in the drain as well. A good example is the RBC, Royal Bank of Canada, this is an example of a rich bank, now a good question is : Who is the owner of that Bank. The standard answer is 'the public' this is true and not true at the same time. For most of the voting shares in absolute number it is but in fact there are shares that are worthless in terms of ownership and others (very few) that have most of the voting power and ownership of the bank. In other words, the important share of the RBC is owned by international owners that are very difficult to identify precisely, I know, I tried to do that exercice once and found nothing. Go to the RBC site, read whatever available information there is about that bank and you will find that it is difficult to find a clear answer about that. I took into account the Lavoisier principle ; Rien ne se perd, rien ne se crée, tout se transforme. Another simple principe is ; if you want to understand something in that area : just point your finger in the direcation where the money is going and you will understand a lot of things. The amount of 14.3 billion dollars will have to be paid back to someone or something, in the mean time, if it is owed then someone is paying interest on it, the someone is us. Simon Plouffe