{"id":193355,"date":"2025-09-02T05:47:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-02T05:47:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/193355\/"},"modified":"2025-09-02T05:47:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-02T05:47:11","slug":"waking-france-up-to-the-boomer-pension-timebomb-politico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/193355\/","title":{"rendered":"Waking France up to the boomer pension timebomb \u2013 POLITICO"},"content":{"rendered":"

Compared to other items on the budget, pensions are particularly hard to adjust, said Hippolyte d’Albis, an economist and professor at the ESSEC Business School.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s an expenditure that is binding on society because the parameters that determine it \u2014 most notably the annual indexation of basic pensions \u2014 are set by law and can only be changed by passing a new law,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 2024 the national deficit stood at 6.1 percent of GDP \u2014 double the 3 percent allowed under the EU\u2019s fiscal rules. Paris forecasts that the deficit will not fall below 3 percent until 2029.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Economy Minister \u00c9ric Lombard suggested<\/a> things could get bad enough to require the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to bail the country out \u2014 treatment usually reserved for financial basket cases like Argentina. He backtracked a few hours later after a large wobble in the stock market.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"Fran\u00e7ois Bayrou wants to force through \u20ac43.8 billion worth of budget cuts to bring French spending under control. | Christophe Petit Tesson\/EPA<\/p>\n

The markets are already well aware of France\u2019s troubling fiscal trajectory; the country has already had its credit rating cut<\/a> by the major credit ratings agencies. It\u2019s now a stone\u2019s throw away from seeing its borrowing costs surpass those of Italy, long a byword for reckless spending and unsustainable debt.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

France\u2019s pensions system is unbalanced, but in demographic terms the country is actually a lot better off than many of its peers, with the second-highest fertility rate<\/a> in the EU, at 1.7 births per woman. Italy and Spain, for example, face an even more stark fiscal cliff as the population ages, with only 1.1 to 1.2 births per woman.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrance is the developed country where the standard of living in retirement is the highest compared to the average standard of living of working people,\u201d said Thierry Pech, director general of progressive think tank Terra Nova. He said that raising the working age, which France has already done, is in some ways the \u201cmost brutal method.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt wouldn’t be unfair to involve the wealthiest retirees,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it would require a bit of political courage and a lot of education.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Compared to other items on the budget, pensions are particularly hard to adjust, said Hippolyte d’Albis, an economist…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":193356,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[2841,3232,64,2563,107919,115,26448,18785,407,107920,102288,525,156,8705,1141,7552,266,7337,268,2219,135,398,2853,8707,255,1183,125,345,128,107921,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-193355","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-personal-finance","8":"tag-argentina","9":"tag-budget","10":"tag-business","11":"tag-career","12":"tag-credit-rating-agencies","13":"tag-crisis","14":"tag-debt","15":"tag-demographics","16":"tag-education","17":"tag-eric-lombard","18":"tag-eurozone","19":"tag-finance","20":"tag-france","21":"tag-francois-bayrou","22":"tag-health-care","23":"tag-inequality","24":"tag-inflation","25":"tag-insurance","26":"tag-investment","27":"tag-italy","28":"tag-markets","29":"tag-media","30":"tag-parliament","31":"tag-pensions","32":"tag-personal-finance","33":"tag-research","34":"tag-rights","35":"tag-social-media","36":"tag-spain","37":"tag-tanks","38":"tag-united-states","39":"tag-unitedstates","40":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115133130053473077","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193355","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193355"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193355\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/193356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193355"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193355"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193355"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}