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A Tail Risk Disappears As Le Pen Loses To Macron. Again
Ostensibly, markets "dodged a bullet" Sunday, when Emmanuel Macron vanquished Marine Le Pen at the p
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We French of a non-far right persuasion had feared a tighter score even if a Le Pen upset seemed very unlikely.
That said, it is a truly sad day when 40% of my countrymen are desperate enough/stupid enough/angry enough to say “let’s give fascism a try”. And the program above shared in the box is ridiculous. It’s basically all giveaways – apart from the retirement reform. Of course, people are not going to spit on free money.
Now I am a Demand kind of guy (i.e. I think most problems for the last 40 years are due to wealth and demand inequality and thus a lack of demand from the bottom 50% of the income distribution) but I’ll admit France needs a fair bit of Supply reform too.
Not so much a “deregulation of the labor market” (it’s unpopular and it ought to be addressed once everything else has been fixed) but we ought to increase competition (less corporatism/guilds for specific trades), deregulate (many SMEs stop at either 9 or 49 employees because crossing to 10 or 50 triggers added compliance requirements. That’s a lot of lost growth/employment) and generally improve government efficiency.
Once that’s done, we can try and deregulate labor markets.