“The main cause of France’s economic problems is and remains the euro”

Popular Front: We learned last week that France's borrowing rate had exceeded that of Greece for the first time on the markets. What does this mean?

Jacques Sapir&nbsp: The fact that French rates have exceeded Greek rates is significant but remains largely symbolic. France borrowed at 3.05% compared to 3.03% for Greece. We will say that 3.0% is not much. But, given our low growth (1% per year, or even less) and the low inflation rate (probably 1.5%), these rates, in fact, cost us dearly.

Let's look at the facts first. France must, in new loans and renewal of past loans, raise around 300 billion euros on the financial markets for 2025. Which would cost us around 9.1 billion euros in interest if all loans were at the same rate of 3.05%, which is not the case in reality because the duration of these loans, and therefore the rate, can vary significantly. There are short term loans and others long or even very long term. If we consider that not long ago, we were borrowing around 1.73% on average, we see that this increase in rates will cost us around 3.91 billion additional per year for loans to be made in 2025. This is not negligible in the current situation. So this increase in rates, which results from political uncertainties around the budget, does have an impact in terms of costs.

The real danger is that rates will explode by 2025 while we are stuck in a degraded economic situation. This raises the question of a hypothetical debt crisis.

Overall, the burden of repaying interest on the public debt is around 52 billion euros per year. If we stay at…