Economy On October 1, 2026, France borrowed for ten years at 4.92%, a higher rate than Italy, while hundreds of billions of euros sat idle in checking accounts earning 0.04%. I propose a national loan reserved for individual savers: the ten-year rate minus one point, tax-free, locked for ten years and capped at €50,000. That one-point discount splits the tax wedge, so the saver earns more than on a market bond and the state pays less than it does to foreign funds. The limits are openly acknowledged, from draining the Livret A to fragmenting the bond market, but the interest would finally stay in France.
Society McDonald’s is putting $8.5 billion into repairing a promise it broke itself: the fast-food chain has become slower than a brasserie, more expensive for less on the plate, and too dirty to make you want to sit down. One Sunday, there was not even any meat left. Three merits still hold, and no more: a partly French supply chain, the absence of halal meat, and hours almost no one else offers. Without them, I would rather suck on pebbles than leave this chain so much as a cent.
Geopolitics On September 22, Dassault Aviation flew two sovereign AI algorithms aboard a Rafale. Ten days earlier, France’s defense procurement agency confirmed that France would prepare the Rafale’s successor on its own, SCAF or no SCAF. We have finally taken back the reins. One question remains, and nobody is asking it: who pays? The studies for a sixth-generation engine require a billion euros, the demonstrator has no funding at all, and I am making a fiscal choice that I fully own.
Geopolitics On September 18, Emmanuel Macron gathered his potential successors at the Élysée and insisted three times that soaring prices are not the result of government decisions. The transcript published by the presidency bears him out on the immediate facts: Hormuz was closed by Iran’s response to American and Israeli strikes, Russia is genuinely running a hybrid campaign in Europe, and France chose none of these wars. What remains is the word that recurs like a refrain, enduring, and that is where the account starts to crack. You endure an earthquake, not four years of forks in the road that replaced Russian gas with American LNG at triple the price, indexed a fully amortized nuclear fleet to that gas, and left Europe funding its ally’s defense industry. France does not lack an energy policy. It has one that is tactical, reactive, and never consolidated into doctrine, which is exactly what condemns it to discover its dependencies on the day someone decides to use them.
Digital sovereignty Anthropic filed its confidential S-1 on June 1, is targeting a Nasdaq listing in October at around $2 trillion, and on September 12 its CEO published a plan to slow the AI race. Michael Burry called it pre-IPO hype; he is wrong on the technology, but his calendar is worth a look. Run against the only documented cause we have, the METR report, the three measures meant to protect us would not have prevented a single day of the July incident: internal model, in-house infrastructure, shared cache, unsolvable tasks. They act somewhere else, on price: chip controls, a distillation crackdown, and a compute cap decide who may train, who may learn, and who may cross the next threshold, in a market where the gap between a proprietary model and the open-weight swarm runs fifty to one. And on that terrain, Brussels has already written half the text.
E-invoicing One in two French micro-entrepreneurs reports no revenue at all: half the scheme is an intermittent France of trial ventures, side income, and businesses in transition. To that dormant half, the e-invoicing reform says: pick a private operator and appear in the directory, not in order to invoice, but in order to be capable of it someday. The mandatory-subscription argument is wrong, though: thirteen of the nineteen offerings audited by l0g include a genuinely free tier. The real toll lies elsewhere, in a cognitive barrier to entry and in the precariousness of a free tier that has no reason to survive for customers who generate nothing. By scrapping in 2024 the free public gateway promised in 2020, the state locked in the intermediary requirement and put a price on its entrepreneurs’ sleep.
Digital euro The ECB promises an offline digital euro “just like cash”: no network, anonymous, resilient. But this digital cash can only exist inside a tamper-proof chip in your phone, one whose access is controlled by Apple, Samsung, and Google and which Article 33 of the regulation must legally compel them to open. A capped wallet, an applet updated remotely, anonymity bounded by AML checks at loading and unloading: you no longer own your money, you rent space on a chip. The banknote never had to ask permission to circulate. That difference has a name: the freedom to pay without asking.
Society On France’s “free flow” stretches of motorway, the barriers are gone, replaced by a seventy-two-hour countdown nobody told you about. Miss it and the bill climbs to 10 euros, then 90, then 375, for a toll that was worth six. Motorway companies can obtain your mailing address, but they only write once the penalty has accrued. Article 529-6 of the Code of Criminal Procedure lets them record the offense themselves and keep the proceeds. A business model that thrives only on the user’s ignorance isn’t progress, it’s a trap.
Digital sovereignty In late June 2026, an intruder armed with two stolen passwords wandered freely through French taxpayers’ fiscal records, and the Finance Ministry only grasped the scale of the theft when a hacker calling himself ZeroBytes went public with it two months later. The remediation plan announced in the aftermath reads like a confession: no multi-factor authentication across the board, no consultation quotas, systems without monitoring sensors. Meanwhile, that same state is finalizing mandatory electronic invoicing and DAC8, the largest economic data vacuum in its history. The asymmetry is the whole story: an obligation to surrender everything on one side, a proven inability to protect it on the other. Until the state can demonstrate that it knows how to keep what it already holds, it has no standing to demand more.
Economy On August 19, 2026, the U.S. Treasury tore up its own schedule to double its long-end buybacks, a day after the 30-year yield hit its highest level since 2007. Behind a move framed as technical lies an unprecedented collision: the AI hyperscalers, carrying $3 trillion in off-balance-sheet commitments, are borrowing along the same maturities and from the same lenders as the federal government. The pool of investors willing to lock up capital for thirty years is finite, and the sovereign has just lost that contest. The bill will not wait for an official crisis: it is already showing up in mortgage rates, in Europe as much as in America.