France is aiming for a bank levy of €300m but ” would really like” €1bn, French finance minister Christine Lagarde has announced. Yikes. George Osborne’s feat — taxing the banks £2bn while reassuring them of a level playing field — seems a little less impressive. Might this put Mr Osborne off considering further bank levies?
Lucky for UK banks, then, that the UK levy is so small. And largely offset by corporation tax gains. Read more
France versus Germany
Today’s European Commission confidence indicators provide further reassurance that the region’s recovery remains on track. The eurozone’s economic sentiment indicator continued its v-shape rebound, rising to the highest since June 2008. But there are some interesting divergences – and not just between the big northern European economies and Spain, Ireland, Greece etc.
I was struck by the part of the survey covering manufacturers’ expectations for exports in coming months (which is included only four times a year). German industry is seeing optimism about overseas demand for its products soaring. January’s reading was the highest since the third quarter of 2007 and noticeably better than in the other main eurozone economies. Read more
France vs Germany
Is the economy doing better in Germany than in France? Or is it the other way around? Third quarter eurozone gross domestic product data indicated it was the former. German GDP rose by 0.7 per cent, compared with a measly 0.3 per cent in France.
But purchasing managers’ indices today still show France doing much better than its larger neighbour. The French composite index – covering manufacturing and services – stood at 59.8 in November. The equivalent reading for Germany was just 53.5. With the exception of a short burst in 2006, French private sector activity is growing at the fastest rate for about nine years Read more
French triumph
As a competition, it is not meant to be taken entirely seriously, but Christine Lagarde, France finance minister, is named today as the Financial Times’ European finance minister of the year. She was rated by the judges for her political skills – especially at global summits - and France’s economy has performed significantly better than most of its rivals during the crisis.
I am not so sure if the European Central Bank would approve of the choice. Read more
The stoical French consumer
French consumer spending is helping the country gain an edge over eurozone rivals, writes Ralph Atkins in a Financial Times blog Read more
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Chris Giles has been the economics editor of the Financial Times since 2004. Based in London, he writes about international economic trends and the British economy. Before reporting economics for the Financial Times, he wrote editorials for the paper, reported for the BBC, worked as a regulator of the broadcasting industry and undertook research for the Institute for Fiscal Studies. RSS
Michael Steen, Frankfurt bureau chief, covers the ECB and the eurozone's economies. He joined the Financial Times in 2007 as Amsterdam correspondent and later worked as a front page news editor in London. Before joining the FT, he spent nine years as a correspondent at Reuters, mostly in foreign postings that included a previous stint in Frankfurt, as well as Moscow, Kiev and central Asia. He read German and Russian at Cambridge.RSS
Robin Harding is the FT's US economics editor, based in Washington. Prior to this, he was based in Tokyo, covering the Bank of Japan and Japan's technology sector, and in London as an economics leader writer. Robin studied economics at Cambridge and has a masters in economics from Hitotsubashi University, where he was a Monbusho scholar. Before joining the FT, Robin worked in asset management and banking. RSS
Ralph Atkins, capital markets editor, has been writing for the Financial Times for more than 20 years following an economics degree from Cambridge. From 2004 to 2012, Ralph was Frankfurt bureau chief, watching the European Central Bank and eurozone economies. He has also worked in Bonn, Berlin, Jerusalem and Brussels. RSS
Claire Jones is Money Supply economics team writer, based in London. Before joining the Financial Times, she was the editor of the Central Banking journal and CentralBanking.com. Claire studied philosophy and economics at the London School of Economics. RSS
