France A Worse Credit Risk Than Spain Now

Bit of a change, eh?

So, this is just fun really. Of course, we English know this is true anyway but fun to see it confirmed:

Bond yields on 10-year French government debt hit 2.98pc on Tuesday to equal that of Spain, which has traditionally been viewed as a riskier investment.

It comes amid concern that Michel Barnier, Mr Macron’s new prime minister, will be unable to get French borrowing costs back under control given he lacks a parliamentary majority.

I’ve even seen a claim that France now pays more for money than Greece does. But again, this is obvious to any sensible Englishman. The closer the Johnny Foreigner is the more of an enemy they are, the less they can be trusted and, obviously, the higher the interest rate necessary to make up for that. You wait and see what the Welsh and Scots bonds will be paying once they’re allowed to issue them, you mark my words.

But moving away from the obvious and serious to something more jocular.

Borrowing costs imposed on France

And, no, really, just no. Yes, yes, we all know what they’re saying but it doesn’t work as a construction.

Think of the average nutter - the average socialist but I repeat myself - who’ll scream the house down about the power of The City, of “the market”. This is to make a category error, it is to reify the markets. Those markets are not, for all the linguistic ease of our saying so, “a thing”. They’re just you and me and the folk holding our chequebooks, that’s all. There’s no thing there, no market view, no market control - either control of the market or the market controlling other things. Just that interaction of 8 billion people each counting their own pennies.

The markets - as opposed to the market - do not impose borrowing costs upon anyone. They don’t impose anything at all. There’s a price at which people will lend you their pennies, a price at which they won’t. That changes over time. And, erm, that’s it. This is not an imposition.

Now, obviously I’m one of those who think that markets are really cool things on the grounds that, you know, markets are really cool things. But it is possible to reify them and that’s always a mistake. They’re just us, us making our individual decisions. There is no “market” that has power over us or governments.

We might well have said - or some of us - that we’re not lending money to the Frogs at that price. Sensible, no one should lend money to Frogs, obviously. But that is all it is. It’s not market power, it’s not an imposition. It’s just our money, Frogs, let’s not mix the two, eh?