Belying its reputation as a pioneer in derivative product management and market risk control, the French banking institution Société Générale (SG) suffered in January 2008 the largest ever trading loss in financial market history. The origins of this loss and the way in which the bank...

The two emblematic measures of the bill purporting to reform France's capital tax system – involving a dismantling of the country's tax shield and a simplification of its ISF Impôts de Solidarité sur la Fortune wealth tax schedules – have been left untouched by the national Parliament. At...

In a kind of double paradox, the French government started a major reform of the country's capital taxes during the final year of the current legislature, concurrently with its dismantling of the “fiscal shield” that symbolised the 2007 TEPA Work, Employment and Purchasing Power law (Loi...

The study's first section introduces the economic and legal constraints complicating the budgetary mathematics that all European countries are facing today, while demonstrating the challenges of applying current budgetary and fiscal doctrine in the draft bills that are currently making their way...

The German Mittelstand, which has nurtured many debates – and fantasies – in France regarding the two countries' relative competitiveness, is often invoked as a quasi-mystical indicator capable of explaining almost all by itself the diverging trade performance of the Eurozone's two largest...

This study has a dual ambition. One is to develop, for the first time ever, a complete Theory of tax expenditures and, therefore, a proposal for reforming the French tax loophole system. Having noted the proliferation of such loopholes in France and elsewhere over the past 20 years or so, we...

The collapses of major financial institutions during the latest crisis have 5 common causes both internal (authoritarian leader, failing on internal governance system, use of leverage) or external (access to cheap short-term funding, regulators nonchalance). The lessons to be drawn are an...

The respective trajectories of fiscal and budgetary policies during the presidential 5-year term of office now coming to an end have been very different: fiscal policy underwent a spectacular U-turn in 2013, whereas the continuity of budgetary policy was undeniable. There were two periods of...

The main result of the quick reactions of the Federal Reserve (the Fed) and the European Central Bank (ECB) to the Covid-19 crisis are that more than 20% of their public debt is now held by these central banks and that the balance sheet of the ECB is now near 50% of GDP (33% for the Fed). Two...