Les « dealers » de la dette souveraine : politique des transactions entre banques et État dans la grande distribution des emprunts français

This article analyzes the commercial interactions formed around the French sovereign debt between the state and commercial banks. The survey focuses on the practical operation of the French primary dealers, the private bank network charged with “making the debt market”, that is to say ensuring the distribution, sale and valuation of government bonds, and interacting with senior officials of the Agence France Trésor (AFT) at the Ministry of Finance. The government strategy of creating this network of wholesalers, to reduce the cost of transmission and to ensure the quality of French debt in the international capital markets, is one of the channels through which the interpenetration of interests between public finance and private finance travels. The mode of relationship thus required between private banks and the state is that of a “partnership” structured by transactions and exchanges of good practices whose public and political legitimacy is sometimes uncertain and which has the effect of locking a market arrangement for state funding.