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Do you mind expanding or posting some links as to the pending French financial crisis? I find many people love throwing out bearish statements, but rarely do they come to fruition.
I should do an effortpost on it since I've been religiously consuming economic takes on it for months now from both the left and the right.
But the short version is that France has been living above its means for a long time, that political will has never managed to lower spending and that we're so tax happy that there's no more juice to squeeze.
German style fiscal discipline is politically untenable in France, but French style dirigisme is banned by the EU. So the continuous policy of every government has been to pretend to be center-right and do potemkin reindustrialization whilst all of the actual business left the country and they grew the deficit.
And now we're at the stage where interest on debt is very large, and France barely managed to escape its bond notation being downgraded to a level that percludes safe investment funds from touching it (a now forgeone conclusion given the political instability). So it's going to become much harder to borrow, and nobody has the political will to seriously cut into the budget.
Hence how this government has fallen in fact: their budget was mostly tax increase (in the highest taxed country in the world) which is the reason stated by the RN for their key support to the censorship.
The usual next step for countries in this state is for the IMF to come in with your creditors and force you to cut things out of the budget and sell assets. The escape from that fate is to get bailed out by a friendly country, which in this case would have to be Germany, but Germany too is broke right now.
It's even less that Germany is broke and more that it is constitutionally forbidden from assuming debt that it could afford to take on. This is/was the reason for the breakdown of the German coalition, as Scholz was trying to change the debt break in order to take on more debt.
The issue for France is that it is too big for Germany to simply bail out... without substantial, major, concessions that make it extremely clear (to the German public) that it is a purchase, not a loan to never be paid back.
Imagine after all the losses they took in regaining them, France sells Alsace-Lorraine back to Germany to keep their economy afloat.
Not a likely scenario by any means, but could you imagine?
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I don't even want to imagine the political consequences of selling France to the Germans in the way Greece was. "The diktat of Munich" would take a whole new meaning.
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