French Bond Risk Hits Euro-Crisis Levels [video]

A 6 minute video is not an appropriate way to assess interesting things happening in the economy. It might as well just be a "French Bond Risk Hits Euro-Crisis Levels" tweet.

Economies are complicated beasts and the bond market represents the sum of all the thinking around what opportunities exist and how likely they are to pay off. It is a big, complicated beast. There isn't a lot of meaningful information about it that exists between the 7 word headline and 5 minutes of talking heads.

YouTube has some pretty good economic content but it takes at least a half-hour and more reasonably an hour+ to get even introductory coverage of a topic.

The French balance sheet has three big expenses, plus a big decline in tax revenues from their track record of deindustrialization (Renault just can't compete with BYD essentially, but for most types of industry except Aerospace and Fashion, the two of which aren't very big).

These three expenses are pensions, consumer energy subsidies and the 1986 drop in marginal tax rates that has remained to this day. Fixing the balance sheet at this point will need either the starvation diet of cutting these three things or some kind of regimented and austere national training program on compulsory purchased land (paid in deferred interest bonds like Singapore did) to build any kind of economy that has a hope of competing with Chinese products. Or possibly, a mix of both.

However, it's an open question of whether the French state has the ability to force hundreds of thousands of youths into STEM barracks if it desired to. The barracks don't exist in enough numbers and the francophone STEM experts to be recruited to do the army-style STEM training in this hypothetical might also not exist in enough numbers for it to ever work.

Not mentioned by me so far is the additional option of cutting energy costs directly by building green production under a nationalised program, or intervening in the Russo-Ukrainian war, or intervening in the US-Iran war, or seizing African fossil fuels production by force. The first one might work, I don't know about the bottlenecks, but the French conventional military is not in a position to make the other three work.

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If they don't do anything at all they will just get poorer and more prone to mass violence. Prosperity comes from producing goods and services at some combination of price and quality points that the competition doesn't beat you at and the competition in the world today is very fierce.

Handy site that has bond rates for countries:

* https://www.investing.com/rates-bonds/world-government-bonds

France has something like 400+ different taxes, more than 6x the number of taxes that exists in, say, Germany. France also has, officially, nearly 60% of its GDP that is public spending. And out of what's left, many companies are fake private companies, ran by apparatchiks very close to french politicians.

So France is basically a planned economy. And an insane number: 70% of the young people in France dream of... Working in the public sector. For it's the only way they can envision having a stable job.

France is a country where you plant public servants and taxes do grow.

And now we see the results and they're not nice.

France's public spendings have always been out of control and it's a country that is deeply sick, falling under the weight of all the insane regulations and taxes it created.

The time of the Concorde and Minitel is very far behind.

And for a country that sees red, thinks red and loves red, the delicious irony that the biggest french companies are those exporting luxury goods like Hermes handbags isn't lost on me.

I don't see any future ahead for France besides becoming a country of the 3rd world: and in many french cities there are already entire neighborhood looking just like that.

Education levels are down the drain, culture is down the drain.

It seems to be an endless fall.

Strange that this is happening globally. I get that this is a US site, and people don't care, but this does not seem to be a French story at all. Nor is it a US story. France is the worst example (worse than the US I might add). But EU yields are up to 3.5% (not far behind, and, worryingly, making the same moves), and the same goes for other countries (Netherlands 3.6%, Spain 3.6%, Austria 3.8%, Germany 3.6%, Japan 3.1%, ..., all up from zero to negative 3 years ago, Poland 6.4%, Czechnya 5.3%, Hungary 5.8%, Australia 5.5%, ... all up from 0.5-2% 3 years ago). The same pattern is all over the place, and it's barely started.

The problem is that it's the factor behind the current and the previous interest rate that makes the effective difference in budget. Because if your interest goes from 0.1% to 3.5%, your interest payments go up 35x, or 3500%. It's logical and predictable, and so there are some mitigations in place, but ... And it means the good borrowers are in the deepest shit (need the biggest budget adjustments)

(and sorry to say this, but this is 100% a self-inflicted wound. EU countries bet on US for security (against US wishes), Russian LNG for energy (easy to satisfy green targets), and China for an export market). All bets blew up in the politicians faces, cost hundreds of billions EU-wide and so we're seeing the demands on government budgets, that need to re-invest without the previous investments being paid off ... I'm sorry but however terrible AfD is, for example Germany's CDU 100% deserves getting clobbered in elections, because the CDU alliances (essentially all parties) made horrible decisions. AfD and Die Linke are worse on many points, but at least they didn't cause the current situation.

Also there's some sideshows, like Hungary actually being down to 5.8%, presumably through more trust in the current government vs the last. But the pattern vs 3 years ago is one of constant rise.

And there are exceptions, India, for example, is showing a different pattern. China does not make sense (but I'm sure that's just by design, and plenty of indicators they're not actually doing well). And then Russia, but I have a guess for that one. Ukraine ... etc ...

But bond investors seem to be expecting something dramatic to happen soon, with odds rising fast, at least across US and EU, including individual countries. At the very least, investors are expecting an economic disaster for the next 10 years (at least compared to the last 10 years)