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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The French government has just published its social security and finance bills for the year 2022. They do not constitute commitments because next year, presidential and National Assembly elections will occur. So the future government will have full discretion to take or to deeply modify the measures which will be adopted. But these texts carry precise data regarding the public finance current situation and its foreseeable short term evolution, under the hypothesis, of course, that we don’t see a new wave of the pandemic.

The budget is presented on the basis of better growth forecasts than what was expected ...

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