The Great Debate

French President Francois Hollande’s predicament is, oddly enough, akin to one Alice faced in Lewis Carroll’s 19th century classic.

A year after taking power, Hollande is buffeted by the lowest popularity of any modern Gallic leader, a record number of jobless, a recession and shriveled business investment – while still needing to cut his budget deficit to hit European targets.

The protagonist of Alice in Wonderland, meanwhile, confused by her strange encounters down a rabbit hole, meets the Queen of Hearts, who tells her: “My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere, you must run twice as fast as that.”

The Socialist leader, says AXA Group Chief Economist Eric Chaney, is in a rabbit hole.

“The situation is much worse in France in the past year,” Chaney told me from Paris, where AXA, Europe’s No. 2 insurer, is based. “Italy and Spain are implementing reforms. France is doing nothing. So it is getting closer to the periphery [of weaker European nations]. What the queen said to Alice applies to France.”

Arnaud Montebourg, a member of the French parliament, has a problem with the iPhone. He thinks consumers in France should pay more for it than they already do. Why? Because, he says, the iPhone is made by “exploited” laborers in China who are taking away the jobs of French workers and the best way to redress that is by putting in place trade barriers and taxes that will stop “excessive imports.”

Then there’s Renault in Morocco. When the French automaker opened a new factory in Tangiers in February, Montebourg decried the move as “a humiliation for French industry,” because Renault hadn’t built the plant in France even though the French state is an important shareholder.

Montebourg’s protectionist stance – he calls it “deglobalization” – is well known in his native France, but now he’s unleashing it on the world. In the new Socialist government, Montebourg is the “minister for productive recovery,” a job whose precise perimeter remains hazy but that appears to cover large swaths of industry and commerce. His first official statement was an announcement that he intends to lean on companies including Shell, ArcelorMittal, Unilever and Peugeot, that are planning to close facilities or lay off workers in France.

His political allies wrote him off as a lightweight, “a pedal-boat captain in a storm” as one memorably put it. European leaders, including Germany’s Angela Merkel, have gone out of their way to avoid him, and the markets have been unimpressed by his declaration, to the City of London, that “I am not dangerous.”

Yet with opinion polls in France unanimously predicting that François Hollande will be elected president on Sunday, this is a good time to be asking just how bad his presidency really would be for France, for Europe and for the markets.

If he does win, will he be able to inspire confidence and rebuild and renovate the fragile economy, with its heavy debt, stagnant growth and rising unemployment? Or will he preside over its rapid descent into Greek- or Spanish-style chaos, as Nicolas Sarkozy, the incumbent at the Elysée Palace, keeps warning?

Jim O'Neill, the new Goldman Sachs Asset Management chairman who is famous for coining the term BRICs for the world's new emerging economic giants, reckons he knows why Germany might not be rushing to bail out all the euro zone debt that is under pressure. Europe is not as important to Berlin as it was.

Speaking at the Reuters 2011 Investment Outlook Summit being held in London and New York, O'Neill pointed out that in the not very distant future Germany will have more trade with China than it does with France.

"It's a different global environment. That's why maybe Germany (ties)  itself to a rules-based game with the rest of Europe because economically it doesn't mean so much to them now. What goes on in China is more important than what goes on in France and that's puts a different economic (spin) on the situation for the Germans."

From Dublin to Paris to Budapest to inside those brown UPS trucks delivering holiday packages, it has been a tough few weeks for savers and retirees.

Moves by the Irish, French and Hungarian governments, and by the famous delivery company, showed that in the post-crisis world retirees, present and future, will be paying much of the price and taking on more of the risk.

This goes beyond merely cutting back on pension benefits, rising to actual appropriation of supposedly long-term retirement assets to help fund short term emergencies.

Economist Douglas Irwin of Dartmouth College has stirred up a bit of a fuss by concluding in some academic research that it was France, not the United States, that was most to blame for The Great Depression.

Irwin's theory, in a paper posted here by the National Bureau of Economic Research, is that France created an artificial shortage of gold reserves when it increased its share from 7 percent to 27 percent between 1927 and 1932.  Because major currencies at the time were backed by gold under the Gold Standard, this put other countries under enormous deflationary pressure.

To prove his point, Irwin ran a model looking at what would have happened without the French move. The results:

Michael Goldfarb serves as a GlobalPost correspondent in the United Kingdom, where this article first appeared.

In America, the health care debate is about to come to a boil. President Barack Obama has put pressure on both houses of Congress to pass versions of his flagship domestic legislative program prior to their August recess.

Good luck.

Opponents are filling the airwaves with the usual litany of lies, damned lies and statistics about socialized medicine and the twin nightmare of bureaucratically rationed health care and high taxes amongst allies like Britain, France and Germany. So here is a brief overview of health care in some of Europe’s biggest economies: Britain’s National Health Service is paid for out of a social security tax. Services are free at the point of provision. No co-pay, no reimbursement. The budget last year was 90 billion pounds (about $148 billion). That makes the average cost per person about 1,500 pounds ($2,463).

– Brian Lee Crowley is the founding president of Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS), a public policy think tank in Canada (pictured left) and Valentin Petkantchin is director of research at the Paris-and Brussels-based Institut économique Molinari. The views expressed are their own. –

President Barack Obama’s package of heathcare reforms – mandatory health insurance, public health option and increased federal government financing – is being sold as preserving independent high quality care and choice for patients while keeping down costs. Taxpayers and patients in both Canada and France know better.

Unfortunately, our experience is that once the government gets its nose in the healthcare tent, not only is spending not contained, but health care professionals lose their freedom to practice. Left with few choices, patients face shortages and waiting lists.