Archives Jan. 1, 2021

We believed we had finished, at least in developed countries, with inflation which had been a major factor of disequilibrium, until the Nineties. To cope with it, monetary policies had been extended to an extreme, as in the United States in 1979. That had been, when the euro and the European Central Bank were created, the major concern of the founding countries like Germany which was still reminding the disasters of the Twenties, which were not without link with the Nazism ascension. It is why, in the ECB mandate, the first priority was to act to keep inflation in the ...

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During the Seventies, we were convinced that prices control was necessary to cope with inflation. It is, to the contrary, their freeing which allowed France to getting rid of that structural weakness. On the same, it was believed during a long time that the consumption rebound was generating a trade deficit as in 1982. We know today that it is wrong and it was the consequences of the huge increase of the dollar on the oil bill which were at the origin, during that period, of the French trade balance degradation. The recent history is not getting itself always from ...

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The very strong passed and announced price increases of the fossil energies and of power remind us a time we thought it was bygone, with the oil prices shocks of the Seventies. The Middle-East and African countries oil producers did gather in 1960 to create OPEC in order to counterbalance oil majors full power. In 1973 the organization decided to limit its production and ordered an embargo against the United States and the Low Countries as the consequence of the Kippur war. The barrel price jumped from 3 to 12 dollars. A new disequilibrium occurred on the market four years ...

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