Deal of new French bashing

France's Prime Minister thinks a Nobel Prize for some Frenchman he's never read, should be reason to crow;

Manuel Valls on Monday hailed the country’s two Nobel wins this year and, in a dig at certain Anglophone businessmen, politicians, and right-wing media, added that it was a slap in the face to all those who criticise France.

"After Patrick Modiano, another Frenchman reaches the top: congratulations to Jean Tirole," Valls tweeted after the Nobel economics prize was announced, adding that it "really thumbed the nose at French bashing."

Peut-être that's premature;

France wants €10 billion a year from the EU’s “New Deal” fund, amid warnings that its budget profligacy could harm the “credibility” of EU financial rules.

Because;

Credit rating agency Standard and Poor's last week dropped France's outlook to “negative” and predicted a deficit of 4.1 percent between 2014 and 2017.

Speaking at the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington DC on Friday (10 October), the Dutch finance minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem, who also chairs the 18-member group of eurozone finance ministers, described the new budget plans as "simply not good enough" and "too far off target".

Left unchanged they would "damage the credibility of the pact", he said, adding that "the ball is in the court of the French to look at those figures and see what more can be done".

Maybe M. Valls' fair-haired boy could offer some advice;

Hours after he won the economics Nobel Prize, [Jean] Tirole said he felt “sad” the French economy was experiencing difficulties despite having “a lot of assets”.

“We haven’t succeeded in France to undertake the labour market reforms that are similar to those in Germany, Scandinavia and so on,” he said in telephone interview from the French city of Toulouse, where he teaches.

France is plagued by record unemployment and Tirole described the French job market as “catastrophic” earlier on Monday, arguing that the excessive protection for employees had frozen the country’s job market.

“We haven’t succeeded also in downsizing the state, which is an issue because we have a social model that I approve of – I’m very much in favour of this social model – but it won’t be sustainable if the state is too big,” he added.

Tirole remarked that northern European countries, as well as Canada and Australia, had proven you could keep a welfare social model with smaller government. In contrast, he said France’s “big state” threatened its social policies because there will not be “enough money to pay for it in the long run”.

Which is just how Margaret Thatcher (gasp!) put it; The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money.