Dystopian Horizon: The Great Schism
October 5, 2025The 2020 crisis, fueled by monetary stimulus, has transformed capitalism. Efficiency and Artificial Intelligence have become Wall Street’s sole imperatives, carving out a historic gap between the euphoric markets and the labor force. This divide between the Stock Market and the Street is more than just economic—it is a civilizational warning. The Wealth of…
Germany has everything to lose
July 14, 2025It’s Germany that has the most to lose from the 30% tariffs imposed by the USA: just look at its gigantic trade surplus with Trumpian lands. For at least 20 years—through hundreds of articles, countless conferences, and interviews—I have been warning: Europe must not give in to German pressure, which seeks to turn it into…
Leo XIV, Donald Trump, and the Invisible Hand
May 19, 2025May 15, 1891. Leo XIII: the Catholic Church dives headfirst into the economic arena. Rerum novarum (“Of New Things”) is a theological uppercut against socialism, a fiery response to the shockwaves of the Industrial Revolution. In it, the pope smashes the idea of collectivism trampling private property, and declares the Church’s allegiance to the market…
Hail the sacred neoliberal — the end is nigh
May 12, 2025Chinese surpluses are not eternal. Just as neoliberalism is not immutable. Even though nearly all economists, analysts, and journalists would cry out in outrage whenever a rare few like myself dared to question it. It was the absolute dogma, an irresistible force, a determinism that imposed a heavy, long-term continuity — against all odds. Jürgen…
Pitiful Germany
December 17, 2024Germany is now heading toward early elections. Chancellor Scholz has lost the confidence vote in Parliament, signaling the end of the coalition that had already collapsed on November 6. The main issue? In short, the budget, and especially the famous “debt brake” that was enshrined in the German constitution under Merkel. The federal budget…
All Quiet on the Eastern Front…
September 2, 2024Germany’s right-wing party AfD is much stronger in East Germany than in West Germany. The AfD’s vote share in the East is one third of all voters. The shock therapy implemented by previous governments does not seem to have worked… A little reminder : https://michelsanti.fr/en/germany/german-prosperity-a-nightmare-for-40-of-its-citizens
The return of sick man of Europe
July 13, 2024In an environment where the German economy is extraordinarily energy-intensive, while the dogmatic policies of the Greens dramatically penalize all economic actors, company bankruptcies are reaching record and frightening levels in a Germany that is literally on the path to deindustrialization. Merkel will have many accounts to settle with History.
The ECB: Both a Solution and a Problem for European National Policies
June 24, 2024The European Union is repeating the same mistakes the United States made during the Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s. Europe needs fiscal stimuli and budget deficits. Unemployment and the decline in purchasing power are not the result of “budgetary indiscipline,” but rather stem directly from weak demand. This lesson from the…
K
May 23, 2024Remember this letter “K” well, a symbol of the massive imbalances that twist our Western societies. There is the tiny minority enjoying an absolutely unprecedented surge in financial markets and private investments, who—indifferent to prices—are thriving economically. They are represented by the rising and triumphant branch of the K. Then there are all the…
Abusive share buybacks
May 7, 2024In 10 years, Apple spent $ 625 billion buying back its own shares. This astronomical sum is equivalent to the market capitalization of the entire major Standard & Poor’s index, which includes 492 companies ! Financial engineering at its most dubious.
No need for electric shocks to reduce public debt
April 23, 2024See for yourself the impressive improvement in the Debt/GDP ratio of Greece and Portugal! Yes, inflation works very well to lighten the burden of public debts, provided we fix the duration of our loans and do not issue inflation-indexed debt. The deprivations inflicted on our populations are much more a matter of punitive intent than…
The Ravages of Economic Dogmatism
April 20, 2024They have brought Europe to a standstill. The productivity differential is widening further every quarter between us and the United States, who are racing ahead, far ahead of the European Union with their 2.6% growth compared to the pitiful European regression of 1.2%. Mario Draghi warned us a few months ago, stating that…
The Year 0 of Germany
March 20, 2024This is striking! The energy crisis of 2022 has been the worst economic crisis in Germany since WWII when looking at the decline of real wages. The increase in the price level is very likely permanent – those with savings have unexpectedly lost some of their purchasing power. The real estate owners (upper middle class)…
World : Life prognosis at stake
March 18, 2024It’s always the same eternal questions that torment us when a bubble bursts and wreaks havoc on human, economic, and ecological fronts: How did we get here? What happened? Our world finds itself today in a critical situation with few historical precedents because we are now all hostages to multiple and repetitive bubbles. There’s the…
The purpose of money
March 3, 2024The German Finance Minister, Lindner, a great strategist in the eyes of the Almighty, announces the implementation of an austerity plan consisting of reducing public spending by 30 billion in 2025… thus condemning his country and the rest of Europe to assured recession. A recession occurs when a state is suddenly gripped by the desire…
The billions of the energy transition and the risks of wastage
November 20, 2023Tough times for those who thought, with naive enthusiasm, that the staggering sums poured by our states to facilitate the carbon transition would all be used wisely. What can now be referred to as green scandals have been occurring for some time, reflecting—or as a consequence of—governments engaging in a real race to spend the…
End game
February 12, 2023The gold standard was a system where the currency of a country was linked to gold and which could materialize either by defining a certain quantity of metal in exchange for the American dollar, or indirectly through currencies having a fixed parity against the greenback. As early as 1944 with Bretton Woods, only central…
The financial crisis will not happen
January 5, 2023This phenomenon occurs quite rarely, always in the event of liquidity crises, i.e. in times of great financial stress such as in 2008 or at the start of the Covid crisis. It translates into a gluttonous appetite for the US dollar sought after by the entire planet because it is sorely lacking. It is…
Truss debacle: markets turned whistleblowers
November 3, 2022“We meant to change a nation, and instead, we changed a world” was an emblematic declaration by Ronald Reagan who shared throughout his Presidency with Margaret Thatcher fundamentally individualistic obsessions where the State represented the absolute threat against freedom and against property. And, in fact, their advent – of Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States – provided these…
Germany: a country undone
August 5, 2022The energy crisis is upsetting the balance of power in Europe, as we finally have realised that Germany is indeed quite fallible. The country’s moral authority was constantly being unleashed upon Mario Draghi during his time as president of the ECB because of his active monetary policy. Germany’s arrogance went as far as proposing…
Inflation is always and everywhere…
February 22, 2022The ghost of Milton Friedman and his oh-so-famous repartee of the 1960s when he said that inflation is “always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon” still haunts us today. It is true that this assertion may seem plausible. After all, the immediate consequence of inflation is a rise in prices, which are denominated in money,…
Economics: an inexact science
November 13, 2021The raising of America’s debt ceiling has again been in the headlines these last few weeks. It was in 1917 that this practice began in the US, not to put the brakes on public spending as many believe, but to give flexibility to the executive branch during its participation in the First World War.…
Japan, mirror of the world
June 29, 2021Japan is the world’s laboratory. It’s in this country that in 2001, for the very first time, the famous quantitative easing measures were put in place that tried to break the believed-to-be impenetrable barrier of zero interest rates that had been set in 1999. It was a revolutionary endeavour for the time, led by…
Politics and finance: an incestuous relationship
May 27, 2021There was once a time when what was good for General Motors was as a matter of course good for the USA. Nowadays, what’s good for Wall Street is good for the USA, a country that now lives under the influence of a financial oligarchy. The powerful myth of the US as a “nation…
How do we escape Europe’s purgatory?
March 7, 2021There are good reasons to fear the future of Europe – and to fear for the future of Europe – when a moderate and deeply pro-European figure like Clément Beaune launches what is basically a petition in Les Echos, as he did on March 3rd. But let’s be real, because the old timers who…
The corruption of our societies
January 6, 2021Nearly all our economies’ problems arise from the concentration of power. Our system of freedoms has gradually been trampled over by monopolies of all kinds and to different extents, that have increased the costs of health, medicine, food, agricultural products, and a whole range of commodities and materials. It’s the tens of millions of…
Inequalities are an inevitability but the truth is a right
December 5, 2020More jobs will be lost. More businesses will go bust. More people will slip into precariousness. More children will go hungry. Let’s not kid ourselves about the exorbitant economic cost of the crisis to come. Also, the people must know what to prepare themselves for and they deserve clear explanations from their governments. They…
My economic testament
November 10, 2020In my book, Le testament d’un économiste désabusé [Testament of a disillusioned economist], that is in fact a glossary of economies in crisis, you will not find under the letter C the term ‘Coronavirus’, nor the economic and social consequences of this health crisis or of its management by our authorities. While this ‘testament’…
Austerity is not an inevitability !
May 18, 2020You are greatly mistaken if you think Europe’s woes to come will be caused by a liquidity crisis. It is in fact a solvency crisis that poses an imminent threat to many members of the Union who don’t really need their funding costs to decrease, but who are desperately in search of transfers and…
Economists: can we trust them?
October 28, 2019Chile is the only Latin American country that is a member of the OECD, and not long ago it was still being cited as an example to follow because of its success and economic recovery. It is, however, just the latest victim to date of a neoliberalism whose ravages have now become universal. Chile’s fall…
The People against the Economists
September 9, 2019In his time, Franklin Delano Roosevelt dismissed John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential and brilliant economists of the 20th century, who was labelled an “unorthodox mathematician” by this president. In his farewell address, Eisenhower had warned his citizens against the technocrats in power, the same who were recently described by Emmanuel Macron…
Welcome to the worst of worlds
October 31, 2018How could we not recall the British cult TV series from the ‘60s, The Prisoner, where a giant bubble frantically pursued the hero played by Patrick McGoohan? Our world now finds itself in a similar situation: we are all hostages to the now-plentiful bubbles, and not only the speculative bubbles that infect our markets. It’s…
Are we all complicit in globalisation?
June 25, 2018Milton Friedman maintained the theory that unfettered free trade would generate – in the long term – a wealth that would trickle down over everyone. Contrary to the ideas made out, the liberalisation of trade (which goes hand in hand with the free circulation of capital) is not the only reason for the world’s dramatic…
German prosperity: a nightmare for 40% of its citizens
April 12, 2018The German economic miracle has its dark side, demonstrated by a massive budget surplus of 1.2% of GDP – that being 38.2 billion euros in 2017 – that’s causing the country’s infrastructure to tumble, which is now the worst infrastructure of all the rich and industrialised nations. Germany’s disproportionate public saving is causing under-investment within…
1929, 1987, 2000, 2007 and 2018: haven’t we learned anything?
February 14, 2018Notwithstanding the drastic adjustment to the stock markets in the way of 10%, the world’s biggest economy, the one that’s always ahead of everyone else in growth and also depression, the one that serves as the ultimate example of neoliberalism – America – has made a spectacular recovery since the 2007-08 crisis. With its property…
Hyman Minsky, the clairvoyant black sheep
October 17, 2017Deceased in 1996, Hyman Minsky was an economist who was barely known at all during his lifetime. Only certain enlightened minds – unorthodox ones, of course – were interested in his research which focused on the causes of financial crises. He owed his hour of glory to the subprime implosion in 2007 and it’s as…
Public debt and fake news
September 18, 2017Over the course of its history, the United States of America has seen six episodes of budget surplus. Five of them were immediately followed by depressions. Let us never forget that the orthodoxy – already powerful at the time – had pushed President Herbert Hoover to maintain a budget surplus in 1930, the year of…
The Soviet and European Unions: same lies, same destiny
April 4, 2017The parallels between the European Union of 2017 and the Soviet Union of 1989 are troubling. Didn’t these two systems pride themselves on being “apolitical”, meaning that they were led by a technocratic elite that was detached from real life and “real people”? Faced with economic stagnation, didn’t these two systems react by calling on…
The politics of paralysed puppets
March 28, 2017Globalisation didn’t force States to implement divisive public policies which have exacerbated inequalities and jammed the social ladder. The choice made by our successive governments to enact massive deregulation was deliberate, leaving the market as the sole arbiter of individual liberties and as the only generator of wealth and opportunity, albeit too often a source…
Disintegrating Europe
December 6, 2016Europe was founded and edified on the famous principle of the four liberties. Capital, goods, services and work are meant to be able to move without any restriction anywhere in this mercantile Europe. Unlimited competition goes hand in hand with minimum control over the private sector, which together are supposed – according to the irrefutable…
Brexit versus globalisation
November 5, 2016Brexit was much more than a British electoral consultation to leave the Union. The issues were actually much more serious – and critical for some – than the relatively anecdotal aspect of a country that had never really integrated into Europe. Despite what had been stigmatised by the partisans of the Remain camp, Brexit was…
Europe is the weak link in the global economy
October 29, 2016Today, the crisis confronts those who delivered Europe to the technocrats, bankers and industrial types who are hardly concerned with a united and social Europe. This crisis is not only financial: it consecrates the failure of the European ultra-liberal model. The Founding Fathers of the ECB will focus all the vital energy of their institution…
Capitalism: soon to be a barbaric relic?
October 6, 2016“The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise. In the twenty-first century, only nations that share a commitment to protecting basic human rights and guaranteeing political and economic freedom will…
Brexit, now that’s democracy
June 21, 2016Brexit is not just an electoral consultation that will decide on Britain’s potential departure from the Union. The issues are far more serious – and critical for some – than the relatively by-the-by stance of a country that has never really brought Europe together. Despite what has been stigmatised by the Remain campaign, Brexit is…
Wall Street: how to finish off this vile beast?
February 11, 2016What is the deeper, intimate reason for financial crises? How do cracks appear and why do bubbles implode? It is always for a simple and unique reason, which is that irrational and outlandish bets undertaken by the world of finance are done so with borrowed money! In this regard, the last serious crisis – subprimes…
Financial crisis are painfully commonplace
January 25, 2016Blinder is no one than he who refuses to see. The main factors responsible for the torments of these last few years are still at large, when they haven’t been magnified despite declarations coming from the financial community and authorities claiming to be reassuring. According to them, systemic reforms would have in fact been made…
France: the birthplace of neoliberalism
December 30, 2015France is not just the motherland of human rights. It also played a crucial role in the inception of neoliberal thought which now starves the peoples of Europe. It has had huge responsibility in enforcing the rigorist and moralistic tyranny that today is sterilising the lifeblood of our continent. It is actually France who, in…