Archives Jan. 1, 2024

EDF, the French electricity utility, is connecting this week the Flamanville EPR nuclear reactor to the grid. That good news, yet, is accompanied by the usual negative comments regarding the exceptional length of the works (a 12 years delay) and the construction huge cost overruns (10 billion). If these points are undisputable, they must not mask another very positive reality for France which so has reestablished its capacity to build nuclear power plants. This one had been seriously affected by several major strategic mistakes.

There was first the refusal, at the end of the Nineties, by the successive governments to ...

Continue reading

After having announced, at the end of September, several measures intended to soften the consequences of the real estate crisis which hurts the country (reduction of the personal contribution and of the real estate loans rates and of the banks required reserves) and offered financial supports to local authorities for around 140 billion dollars, the Chinese government has just decided to make more accommodative the monetary policy for the first time for 14 years. It has left to understand that a support program of the household demand will be put into place in 2025. The Chinese president Xi Jinping, when ...

Continue reading

The Barnier government fall after the likely vote of a motion of censure regarding the Social Security financing law is the consequence of the contradictions between the economic policy choices adopted for ten years and the necessity to contain the evolution of the French public debt. But the alarming words employed these last two weeks are immoderate: the comparison with Greece doesn’t make any sense due to the different sizes of the two countries and these about Germany are groundless because the country is going to be confronted with heavy economic difficulties and a real political instability caused by ...

Continue reading