Is this how the great international borrowing spree ends?

In recent months, there have been serious whispers about an outrageous possibility: that one day soon, France — the seventh largest economy in the world — might not be able to pay back its debts. Right now, protesters in France are complaining about crumbling schools, the lack of teachers, and the overall high cost of living. But the government is struggling to find the money to address all the country’s problems. France is in a lot of debt. It has been borrowing record amounts of money. So have many other countries including the U. S., the U. K., Italy, Canada. For more than a decade, there has been an international borrowing spree going on. Now, as interest rates climb, that borrowing spree might have to come to an end. And the consequences could get ugly. Live Show: Planet Money Live at Kilkenomics. Kilkenny, Ireland Nov. 6th - 7th https://kilkenomics.com/ Read: Our book: Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces That Shape Your Life https://lnk.to/i3AukBdD Our weekly longform Planet Money newsletter https://n.pr/3zrFvUBOur weekly Indicator round-up newsletter https://www.npr.org/newsletter/indicator Follow: Instagram https://n.pr/3FqLuwsTikTok https://n.pr/3sGZdrqYouTube https://lnk.to/iCVDaW3CFacebook https://n.pr/3h92GwS Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. Learn more atplus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. This episode was hosted by Jeff Guo and Erika Beras. It was produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler and edited by Marianne McCune. It was fact-checked by Charlotte Isidore and Sierra Juarez. Jimmy Keeley and Travis Hagan engineered the show. Alex Goldmark is the executive producer of Planet Money. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:15Speaker 01

  This is Planet Money from NPR.

• 0:21Speaker 02

  Raise your hand if you have a friend like this. They are driving a car they cannot afford. Their mortgage payments are bigger than their paychecks. They charge everything to their credit card, which they also can't afford. So they keep taking out new credit cards to pay the interest on the old ones.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  That's basically what some of the richest countries in the world have been doing. Over the past decade and a half, their governments have been racking up record amounts of debt. The United States, the UK, Italy, and France, even the Canadians. After decades of heavy spending, the Canadian government now owes more than $1 trillion in debt.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  All of this national debt would have been unthinkable just a generation ago. The big question now, how much debt is too much debt? And that is why a lot of economists are paying very close attention to France right now. Because over the past several months in France, there have started to be serious whispers about an outrageous possibility. The possibility that France might not be able to pay back all of its debts, which could mean that the seventh largest economy in the world might at some point in the future need bailing out.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  These scary whispers are not just coming from politicians. They're not just coming from economists. They are coming from the market itself, from all the people that France is trying to borrow money from.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  Those investors have started to worry that the French government might not pay them back, which is a crazy thing to even say out loud. So now, in order to keep borrowing, the French government has to pay these investors higher and higher interest rates.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  The problem is, France needs to keep borrowing money. It is running a huge budget deficit. France has an aging population, rising healthcare costs, and an expensive pension program. And right now, as you may have heard, maybe from NPR's Eleanor Beardsley, the French people are taking to the streets, not to tell their government to cut back, but to keep spending more.

• 2:24Speaker 03

  The farmers are asking for money. The workers are asking for money. The students are asking for money. Everybody's asking for money. There's money, and we want it, you know?

• 2:33Speaker 02

  But is there money?

• 2:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, no, well, they have to borrow money.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  Eleanor's followed these protests since they started in September. At first, it was students in France's public schools complaining about the lack of teachers, the crumbling roofs, very real concerns. Just go to university and look at everything like. That was Sidney Jassé. Then, as these protests were expanding, the French government revealed its proposal to actually trim some of the budget, spend less. And that really set people off.

• 3:04Speaker 03

  So now, it's really transformed into a massive societal protest. They call them the cost of living protests. They've been absolutely huge. Like, last Saturday, it was like a coursing human river down this boulevard. I mean, you couldn't even get across it.

• 3:19Speaker 01

  In late October, some of the protests got violent. There was looting, there was arson, and some police got violent. Eleanor got tear gassed at one point. But she says, for the most part, the hundreds of thousands of people marching in the streets have been peaceful. They're just frustrated. And to them, all this talk about France potentially running out of money seems like an excuse.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  Have any of the protesters that you talked to, have any of them said anything about, I don't know, France's enormous debt, the budget deficit?

• 3:50Speaker 03

  No, not one. You ask people about the debt out there, and they're like, that's not our, that's not our problem. That's to the government to deal with. Or they say debt is just, one woman told me, debt is just used to keep people in line.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  Eleanor chatted for a bit with this protester. She's a woman in her 50s. Her name is Julie Beatt. And Eleanor asked her, should France just stop paying its debts?

• 4:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, why not? There is a bunch of monnaies in the world. Don't say there is no money. It's not the question that there is no money. There is so much money.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  And look, Julie does have a point. There is a lot of money in the world. It's just that investors are increasingly nervous about lending it to the French government.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  And there is something economically strange about that. Why are investors so spooked by France specifically? Like, sure, the French government does owe a lot of money. But relatively speaking, Italy and Greece are even deeper in debt. And sure, the French government keeps spending more than it collects in taxes. But the budget deficit in the US is currently worse.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  So what is it about France that has investors so worried that we are talking about a potential debt crisis? Or is the better question, why haven't investors gotten spooked by all the rest of us, all the other countries that are also on this runaway borrowing spree? Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Jeff Guo.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  I'm Erica Barris. Today on the show, how borrowing on top of borrowing, on top of borrowing, became the new normal for countries around the world.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  And what all those countries, including the US, might learn from what is going wrong in France.

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• 6:46Speaker 02

  There has been this huge international borrowing spree going on, where all these rich countries are taking on more and more debt. And it wasn't always like this.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Back in the 1990s, economists liked to say that if you were a country with an advanced economy, then your national debt shouldn't exceed 60% of your GDP. That was considered the upper limit of safe. So like in the early 2000s, the US was at around 54%. If your government was borrowing more than that, then your country was venturing out onto thin ice.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  These days, a lot of rich countries have blown way past that number. The UK is at 102, the US is at 126, Italy is at like 137. You know, we are all testing the limits. Tomas Filippone is a professor at NYU. He says, not since World War II have we ever seen so many rich countries borrow so much money for such a long period of time. And now, Tomas says, we're all just watching to see what level of borrowing and spending is going to put a country in danger, like, you know, push it over the edge. It's like the penguins and the orcas. One is going to be the first one to find out where the limit is. So I guess in this analogy, is France the penguin that's falling off the iceberg right now? Yeah, potentially could be.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  By the way, we know that this is not an entirely accurate description of how penguins behave in the wild, but we did not call up Tomas because he studies penguins. We called him up because he is one of the world's leading experts on macroeconomics, and also a longtime advisor to the French government. He serves on this fancy French Council of Economists. Over the past 20 years, he has been watching France's debt climb higher and then higher, and then higher.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  He says, the story goes like this. Back in the 2000s, France's national debt was hovering around that upper limit of 60% of GDP. That was the rule if you wanted to join the euro, because Europe only wanted economically healthy countries to share their currency.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  But then, in 2008, there was the global financial crisis. And France had to borrow a ton of money to fund its economic stimulus, just like a lot of other countries did. And after the crisis, France did not pay down its debt. It just kept borrowing, just like a lot of other countries did.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  By 2020, France's debt had reached more than 100% of GDP. And then COVID got, and boom. When COVID hit, France then had to borrow a ton more money, just like a lot of other countries, to pay for the pandemic response. That's how you end up with 120% of debt to GDP today. And 120%, that's like, I feel like a decade, two decades ago, those were unthinkable numbers. Yeah, but the new normal is, you know, above 100 is the new normal.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Now, to be fair, one reason why so many countries have been borrowing so much is because, for a long time, investors kept giving these countries really cheap loans. You know, it's like that song, "It takes two to make a staggering amount of sovereign debt." I don't know, something like that.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, these cheap loans, they are the other side of the story. So rewind back to the financial crisis. That is when interest rates in the US and Europe went to basically zero. And they basically stayed that way for years. Many governments were able to borrow essentially for free. So a lot of them were like, why not keep borrowing?

• 10:20Speaker 01

  Interest rates stayed so low for so long that eventually, you started to hear very important mainstream economists talking about how they learned to stop worrying and maybe even love the debt.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, in 2019, there was this iconic speech by the president of the American Economic Association at the time, one of the titans of macroeconomics. Without further ado, and with great pleasure, I introduce Olivier Blanchard.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  Olivier Blanchard walks up to the lectern. He's in this crisp navy suit, dark red tie, looks more like a banker than an academic. And he starts talking about the problem of government debt.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  It's essential that public debt is incredibly costly. And you hear calls for dramatic decreases in public debt. But then, he started saying something that sounded kind of radical. He was like, look at how low the interest rates are right now. If countries can borrow this cheaply, then maybe they won't ever need to pay off their debts. If this is going to be the case for the future, you can do what's known as a debt rollover. You just issue.

• 11:25Speaker 05

  You debt and then you never repay.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  I remember that moment very well. This week, with everything that's going on in France, we went back to Olivier Blanchard. And he told us the point of that speech was to get people to reconsider what he thought were some of the old superstitions about debt. You know, when it comes to debt, people have very, very strong priors. Yeah. They basically, as you know, in German, debt is synonym with sin. And Is it really? Yeah, it is. Yeah, apparently, the German word for debt is schuld, which is also a word the Germans use for guilt and fault, as in your debt, your fault. In French, for what it's worth, the word for debt is just la dette.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  La dette. Anyway, Olivier was basically pointing out that if a country is growing fast enough, it doesn't have to pay off its debt. It can essentially outgrow its debt. We actually did a whole episode on this idea.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  The key thing here is the interest rate on your debt. That's the rate at which your debt is growing and compounding. You just need your economy to grow faster than that. That's why Olivier is always telling people there is no magic number for too much debt. You can live with that at 200%. It may not be great, but you can do it as long as you can stabilize it. You know, you wish you didn't have it, yes, no problem. But it's not the end of the world.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Back when Olivier was giving his speech in 2019, it seemed to him and many people that interest rates would continue to be low for the foreseeable future. So countries could keep on borrowing for the foreseeable future.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  So that turned out to be a mistake. I had not anticipated COVID. I had not anticipated Ukraine. I had not anticipated Iran. I had not anticipated AI. I do apologize for all that, but For not being able to tell the future. Yeah, exactly. The future is really hard to predict, you know. Yeah, in recent years, that weird zero interest rate world we were all living in, we have snapped out of it. Inflation is back. There have been crises and wars. So interest rates are on the rise all around the world, meaning that it's getting more and more expensive for everyone to borrow money, including governments.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  So, starting in the past couple of years, many economists have been wondering, is it time for this international borrowing spree that countries have been on to finally come to an end? Everyone has been waiting to see which country is showing signs of trouble.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  Or, like our other economist, Thomas Philippin put it, who will be the first penguin to get eaten by an orca?

• 14:03Speaker 05

  You know, who's going to be the first to jump in the water?

• 14:06Speaker 02

  In 2024, Thomas and a couple of other economists on that fancy French council published a big report with a big warning to the French government.

• 14:15Speaker 05

  I saw the situation as going, as going in the wrong direction. And I thought that we could try to convince people that the time to act was now.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  Basically, they said, we're not in a crisis right now. Up until this point, France has been growing fast enough to keep all this debt under control. But if we keep piling on more and more debt, pretty soon, we could be in trouble.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  And look, Thomas is not one of those fiscal conservative types who thinks that governments must borrow less and spend less. He used to work as a top advisor to members of the center-left French Socialist Party.

• 14:49Speaker 05

  I thought if somebody like me says, well, maybe it is time to actually, you know, do something, perhaps he would have a tiny bit more credibility.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  In this report, the economists offered what Thomas thought was a fairly mild proposal. They weren't saying that France needed to reduce its debt. They just wanted the government to stop adding to the debt. In other words, to start balancing the budget finally, and not even right away, gradually, over the next seven years.

• 15:18Speaker 05

  The point was, look, we have time. If we act now, we don't have to do something crazy. But we need to start now.

• 15:27Speaker 05

  And I hope that, you know, people would understand that indeed, that was the right thing to do.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  But instead, Thomas says he may have underestimated the nature of modern French politics. Because the French government did not follow his advice.

• 15:42Speaker 05

  Of course, no, they didn't do anything. But, you know, I tried anyway.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, since Thomas and his colleagues published that report in 2024, France's debt problem has continued to get worse. And then, a couple of months ago, there was a pretty ominous warning sign. The interest rate on 10-year French bonds suddenly spiked.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  Investors were demanding that the French government pay an extra premium on its interest rates, like above and beyond what most other countries in the EU pay to borrow money. The interest rate went from 3-ish percent to almost 5%. It's the highest that France has had to pay since the 2000s.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  And that's because investors think that of all the countries in Europe that share the euro as their currency, France is becoming especially risky. They're worried they're not going to get their money back.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  When we come back from the break, why is France getting singled out right now? And what can other countries learn from this situation? You know, asking for a friend? Because if you think France's debt situation looks bad, oof, look at the US.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  Look in the mirror.

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• 17:59Speaker 02

  There is a stereotype in finance, a somewhat unfair, but not entirely wrong stereotype, about European countries, which is that there are basically two kinds. Some European countries are seen as economically responsible. They always pay back their debts, no fuss, no drama. These are countries like Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, and France.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  Then there are the countries that have historically been seen as economically irresponsible, the ones where there always seemed to be some kind of tomfoolery going on with the government or the banks or the markets. These are countries like Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  There is actually this pretty derogatory acronym for these countries, P I I G S, PIGS. Investors used to see these countries as riskier. They were willing to lend money to these countries, but only at a premium.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  But right now, investors think France is a riskier bet than all of those countries. They are charging France a higher interest rate than Italy, than Greece even. Greece, the country that went through that horrible, embarrassing, painful bailout during the financial crisis.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  Greece's debt to GDP ratio is 136% right now. France is only around 120%. So on paper, France's debt, not as bad as Greece's. So why does the market now think that France is a riskier bet than Greece?

• 19:23Speaker 01

  That's because, when it comes to government debt, numbers are not everything. There are also feelings involved, vibes. Thomas Philippin, the NYU professor who advises the French government, told us it's really about whether investors feel the country is moving in the right direction.

• 19:42Speaker 05

  The most important is the trajectory. That is, the market would be extremely happy to finance France with a 120% debt to GDP ratio if they were convinced that there was a credible program to slowly bring it down to 100, say. And so this forward-looking part, this, you know, credibility of what you're going to do in the future is way more important than where you start from.

• 20:09Speaker 02

  So in Greece, for instance, sure, the debt to GDP ratio is 136%. But a few years ago, it was over 200%. Greece's debt has been on a downward trajectory. It is making progress paying off all that debt. And so for now, investors don't see Greece as being a huge borrowing risk.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  And for a long time, investors had good feelings about France. They were willing to ignore France's high debt because they were like, it's France. They will eventually get back on the right track.

• 20:38Speaker 05

  People assume reasonably that, well, eventually, they're going to do something.

• 20:44Speaker 05

  Well, this eventually is becoming like really eventually, eventually, eventually. And some people have a doubt now.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  We are seeing in real time, an example of a country that is slowly losing the benefit of the doubt.

• 20:58Speaker 02

  Couldn't the French government just put out a press release saying, don't worry, we're France. You don't think one of the largest economies in Europe is gonna not pay you back?

• 21:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, but France has been saying that forever. So, and, you know, talk is cheap. By the way, the history of France is pretty terrible in that case because the French kings were serio defaulters, so.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Oh, really? They didn't pay back their debts?

• 21:21Speaker 05

  Oh, no. And they were famous for doing all kinds of mischief.

• 21:24Speaker 02

  Oh, that's bad karma. Tomas says if you just look at the financial situation in France right now, it's not that, that bad. What the investors are really worried about has less to do with economics and more to do with politics. They are starting to think that maybe the French government is just incapable of doing what it takes of raising taxes or cutting spending.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  The rise of the far left on one side and the far right on the other, neither of whom have realistic plans for balancing the budget, has made investors think twice about lending France money.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  And there is a key indicator here, this number that everyone looks at. It is the difference between the interest rate that France has to pay versus the interest rate that Germany has to pay because everyone thinks Germans will always pay their debts. This is called the spread, and it's basically a fear index. It measures how much investors fear that France might not pay back its debts.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  And that fear index, shall we call it, it started to go up in 2024, just when President Emmanuel Macron, who was seen as his economically responsible, balanced the budget type, started to lose control. Since then, the spread or this fear index has remained elevated. And then in late September, that's when the fear index spiked. It was as the protests were getting underway.

• 22:40Speaker 05

  The problem is, the politics is completely messed up. And it was already pretty messed up before the recent protest. The recent protest has highlighted how messed up it is.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  And Tomas says it's not the protesters' fault.

• 22:54Speaker 05

  Many of the things that the protesters are asking for are 100% legitimate. Like, you should have good condition to study. That's a real problem.

• 23:05Speaker 02

  But the more messed up France's politics looks, the higher interest rates they might have to pay. And that raises a scary possibility, a possibility that Olivier Blanchard has been studying in the years since he made that big speech about how sometimes having a lot of debt isn't so catastrophic. Recently, he's been looking at when and how debt does become catastrophic.

• 23:27Speaker 07

  You have this, what I call the danger zone. Where it is exactly, we don't know, but I suspect that in the case of France, we are there.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  Olivier says, once you're in this danger zone where investors have started to lose faith in your government, the situation could spiral out of control.

• 23:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. You see, these higher interest rates that worried investors are demanding, they are going to make it even harder for France to pay off its debt. So France's financial trajectory starts to look worse. It's got this bigger hole to dig out of. And that gets investors even more worried. So they're going to force France to pay even higher interest rates.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  It's like your classic bank run, except on a national scale.

• 24:09Speaker 07

  When it happens exactly, when, you know, when things go from bad to worse, very difficult to predict because it depends on the mood of investors.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  That's scary. It's very scary that you're saying that, right?

• 24:20Speaker 07

  No, please, please, please don't sell your French bonds. Keep them, keep them, keep them.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. Olivier really wanted us to be careful about what we said here because in this situation, perceptions are really important.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  He was actually planning on publishing an editorial about this disaster scenario in a big French newspaper because he wanted to warn the people. He wanted the people of France to take this debt problem seriously. But then he stopped himself. He was like, what if my little op ed is the thing that spooks the markets and triggers this whole doom loop thing?

• 24:55Speaker 07

  If I write in Le Monde that this could happen and this is how it could happen and the steps, it would give more concreteness to an idea that people have not perceived. Now, what you want to do is convince people, but not scare investors, right?

• 25:14Speaker 02

  Olivier and Tomas both say it's pretty clear that France has got to do something. Now, one possibility is that France's leaders could just suddenly decide, hey, we are going to be fiscally responsible now. We're going to cut spending, balance the budget. But given the political winds right now, yeah, that's probably not going to happen.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  Another possibility is that if things start to get much worse, the European Central Bank could come to the rescue. After the financial crisis, the European Central Bank created measures to prevent countries from spiraling into that doom loop that Olivier was talking about. There's also a European Rescue Fund that could offer emergency loans, though it's never had to bail out a country this big. And that money would almost certainly come with strings attached, like France would probably be forced to tighten its budget. It wouldn't be able to keep spending like it used to.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  Tomas says from his point of view, France either starts fixing its debt problem now or it lets the problem get worse. And then it maybe becomes an emergency and France might have to make sudden harsh cuts to the budget.

• 26:17Speaker 05

  Now, the thing is, if you don't, if you do it stupidly and you have to do it very fast, you might end up cutting spending more than you would have to. And you're going to hurt more people, in particular, people who are more vulnerable. So that I find painful because that's unnecessary and unfair.

• 26:32Speaker 02

  And as an American, not to make this all about the US, but

• 26:36Speaker 01

  That's what we do.

• 26:37Speaker 02

  I think that the unnerving thing about what we're seeing in France is that what's happening there rhymes with a lot of what's been happening here in Washington. You think the French government has a lot of debt? The US government has more debt. You think France is running huge budget deficits every year? We are running even bigger deficits. You think French politics is dysfunctional? I mean, look around. Of course, the US is different from France in some key ways. For one, we control our currency. The dollar still has enormous international cachet. Also, the US economy is growing faster than in France. But the most important thing that the US still has right now is credibility.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  Somehow, people still think that despite all our government borrowing, all our deficit spending, all our political dysfunction, that the US is gonna turn it around someday, eventually.

• 27:34Speaker 01

  Save the dates, November 6 through the 8. Planet Money is doing three live shows at Kilconomics, the Comedy and Economics Festival in Ireland. Kilkeny, the town, gets taken over by comedians and economists and will be there, pretending to be one or the other. Find tickets at the link in the show notes or at kilkenomics.com.

• 27:55Speaker 02

  This episode of Planet Money was produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kessler and edited by Mary Ann McEwen, is fact checked by Charlotte Isidore and Sierra Juarez. Jimmy Keighley and Travis Hagan engineered the show. Alex Goldmark is the executive producer of Planet Money.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  I'm Erica Barris.

• 28:09Speaker 02

  And I'm Jeff Guo. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.

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