Get ready for riots. Macron trying to increase pension age in France
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  Get ready for riots. Macron trying to increase pension age in France
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Author Topic: Get ready for riots. Macron trying to increase pension age in France  (Read 6474 times)
lfromnj
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« on: January 12, 2023, 01:34:05 AM »

http://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/01/10/france-macron-to-push-for-pension-reform-again-despite-potential-strikes.html
A neccesary reform but the Fr*nch are sadly too dumb . Fortunately Macron is ignoring the will of the idiots .

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Macron is serving his second term as France's president but overhauling the pension system is a long-standing promise that dates all the way back to when he was first elected in 2017.

France's legal retirement age is currently 62 — lower than many developed markets, including much of Europe and the U.S. The public sector also has "special regimes," or sector-specific deals that allow workers to retire before they're 62.
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Estrella
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« Reply #1 on: January 12, 2023, 02:11:41 AM »

French trade unions have a reputation for neverending strikes, militancy, refusal to compromise and byzantine feuds (Britain has one trade union federation; France has eight). This makes them a darling of leftists, but they forget that only 8% of French workforce are members of a union: literally the lowest percentage anywhere in the EU and lower than even the US. Maybe there's a connection there.

Usually I'm not a fan of union busting, but most of the people who will be marching on the streets against this reform are parasites who don't care about representing workers, only about protecting their sweet little privileges.
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CumbrianLefty
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« Reply #2 on: January 12, 2023, 07:47:30 AM »

Still not convinced the mania worldwide for *increasing* the pension age is a good thing, mind.
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Blue3
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« Reply #3 on: January 12, 2023, 08:03:26 AM »

It doesn't make sense when we're going to need to begin creating UBI's as a kind of "any age pension" sooner than later.
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TiltsAreUnderrated
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« Reply #4 on: January 12, 2023, 09:17:10 AM »

Still not convinced the mania worldwide for *increasing* the pension age is a good thing, mind.

At the absolute worst, it seems pretty close to a necessary evil.

Those on the left should want the electorates to back pro-worker policies. This seems much more likely to happen if more voters are workers (or classed as working age).

Pro-natalist policy is limited in its effectiveness and often neglected, particularly with respect to housing; electorates are skeptical of immigration, too. Unless and until there are more solutions to ageing itself (governments aren't doing nearly enough here), we're going to have ageing populations. These tend to be quite comfortable to keep pensions growing at the expense of everything else (the rest of the welfare state first, debt and taxes next).

The buck has got to stop somewhere. People who are too sick to work obviously need guarantees and manual labourers may need to retire earlier than the rest, but otherwise, raising the state pension age seems the easiest solution.
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lfromnj
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« Reply #5 on: January 12, 2023, 09:50:12 AM »

Still not convinced the mania worldwide for *increasing* the pension age is a good thing, mind.

At the absolute worst, it seems pretty close to a necessary evil.

Those on the left should want the electorates to back pro-worker policies. This seems much more likely to happen if more voters are workers (or classed as working age).

Pro-natalist policy is limited in its effectiveness and often neglected, particularly with respect to housing; electorates are skeptical of immigration, too. Unless and until there are more solutions to ageing itself (governments aren't doing nearly enough here), we're going to have ageing populations. These tend to be quite comfortable to keep pensions growing at the expense of everything else (the rest of the welfare state first, debt and taxes next).

The buck has got to stop somewhere. People who are too sick to work obviously need guarantees and manual labourers may need to retire earlier than the rest, but otherwise, raising the state pension age seems the easiest solution.

One other factor to mention along with increasing lifespan and decreasing birth rates is that  the average age of entry into the workforce is increasing as well. In the Baby Boom era people would have full time jobs on average probably by the time they were 18, by now its probably atleast 20 if not 21. 
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Mike88
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« Reply #6 on: January 12, 2023, 09:57:02 AM »

I think that France is a bit of an outlier compared with the rest of Europe in this matter. France has room to increase retirement age due to its young population, France has one of the highest fertility rates in Europe, compared with, for example, Southern Europe which is facing a rapid aging crisis.
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Sir Mohamed
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« Reply #7 on: January 12, 2023, 10:15:15 AM »

I guess there's no other way to keep social security solvent, along with other reforms? It's really interesting how work and protest culture differs from country to country. Macron is just trying to be a bit more like the rest of the Westen world.
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Antonio the Sixth
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« Reply #8 on: January 12, 2023, 02:01:32 PM »

The neoliberalism is strong with this thread (and of course now the fish will start telling me that "water" is a meaningless buzzword).


French trade unions have a reputation for neverending strikes, militancy, refusal to compromise and byzantine feuds (Britain has one trade union federation; France has eight). This makes them a darling of leftists, but they forget that only 8% of French workforce are members of a union: literally the lowest percentage anywhere in the EU and lower than even the US. Maybe there's a connection there.

Usually I'm not a fan of union busting, but most of the people who will be marching on the streets against this reform are parasites who don't care about representing workers, only about protecting their sweet little privileges.

Jesus F**king Christ.

You're usually better than this. Please take a second to think through what you're saying.
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Nathan
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« Reply #9 on: January 12, 2023, 02:13:32 PM »

Usually I'm not a fan of union busting, but

Unless the topic of conversation is a police union or something, this is where I tune out and go back to reading my pulp sci-fi novel du jour.
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President Johnson
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« Reply #10 on: January 12, 2023, 02:14:42 PM »

Germany is at 67 and still running into a problem. I get it's not popular and there should be a more flexible solution instead of a fixed age, but it seems something needs to be done to save the pension system for future generations.
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Nathan
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« Reply #11 on: January 12, 2023, 02:26:01 PM »

The presupposition that goes into this approach, which is itself reasonable if you concede that presupposition, is that other aspects of current work culture like working conditions and working hours have to stay the way they are, in other words, that no matter how much automation happens we still have to prop up or even increase the total amount of time people spend working. Giving people more time to do things other than work is a foundational leftist goal going back hundreds, maybe even thousands, of years. Let's not just give up on it now of all times in history.
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iBizzBee
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« Reply #12 on: January 12, 2023, 02:27:12 PM »

The world just got out of covid only to step into an energy crisis, prices are going up, and you hear that in addition you'll have to work longer... Yeah, I'd be pissed too while pharmaceutical companies and other industry mainstay's are seeing record breaking profits all the while and the Uber-wealthy have seen their net worth nearly double over that short timespan.

Something is very wrong with this equation.
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Vosem
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« Reply #13 on: January 12, 2023, 02:44:28 PM »

The neoliberalism is strong with this thread (and of course now the fish will start telling me that "water" is a meaningless buzzword).

In my fishiest moments, I dare to think that water might be good for me.
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TimTurner
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« Reply #14 on: January 12, 2023, 03:12:04 PM »

The presupposition that goes into this approach, which is itself reasonable if you concede that presupposition, is that other aspects of current work culture like working conditions and working hours have to stay the way they are, in other words, that no matter how much automation happens we still have to prop up or even increase the total amount of time people spend working. Giving people more time to do things other than work is a foundational leftist goal going back hundreds, maybe even thousands, of years. Let's not just give up on it now of all times in history.
Work is an essential part of a relatively contented human condition. But the pendulum has swung too far in this direction in many places, as work has in some places tried to snuff out other human things like sex and free time.
Contentment will not come from pushing some principle to its extremes regardless of consequences, of course. It will come from some nuanced end point that respects the diversity of human nice-to-haves. Work is one part of that pie, but it is not the entire pie no matter how much mobilized capital might ever tell us otherwise.
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TiltsAreUnderrated
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« Reply #15 on: January 12, 2023, 03:19:07 PM »

The presupposition that goes into this approach, which is itself reasonable if you concede that presupposition, is that other aspects of current work culture like working conditions and working hours have to stay the way they are, in other words, that no matter how much automation happens we still have to prop up or even increase the total amount of time people spend working.

That's not the only valid presupposition. There's still value in raising the pension age even if all basic needs can be met with fewer workers than before.

As consumers, voters are going to keep valuing cheaper stuff and policies they believe will deliver cheaper stuff (and curbing consumerism is well beyond Macron's capabilities). Unfortunately, this often translates into an incentive to squeeze workers. The incentive is most strongly counterbalanced by the fact that voters are also workers. This incentive is absent for pensioners. If the proportion of the electorate which draws the state pension rises, the electorate is likely to make things worse for workers.

Quote
Giving people more time to do things other than work is a foundational leftist goal going back hundreds, maybe even thousands, of years. Let's not just give up on it now of all times in history.

I agree. We should have a four or three-day workweek, and more 62-year-olds should have a stake in making this happen.
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Nathan
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« Reply #16 on: January 12, 2023, 03:52:32 PM »

The presupposition that goes into this approach, which is itself reasonable if you concede that presupposition, is that other aspects of current work culture like working conditions and working hours have to stay the way they are, in other words, that no matter how much automation happens we still have to prop up or even increase the total amount of time people spend working.

That's not the only valid presupposition. There's still value in raising the pension age even if all basic needs can be met with fewer workers than before.

As consumers, voters are going to keep valuing cheaper stuff and policies they believe will deliver cheaper stuff (and curbing consumerism is well beyond Macron's capabilities). Unfortunately, this often translates into an incentive to squeeze workers. The incentive is most strongly counterbalanced by the fact that voters are also workers. This incentive is absent for pensioners. If the proportion of the electorate which draws the state pension rises, the electorate is likely to make things worse for workers.

Quote
Giving people more time to do things other than work is a foundational leftist goal going back hundreds, maybe even thousands, of years. Let's not just give up on it now of all times in history.

I agree. We should have a four or three-day workweek, and more 62-year-olds should have a stake in making this happen.

This is a reasonable argument, but based on Macron's now-extensive track record of crass rightism masquerading as enlightened liberal post-post-post-ideological galaxy brain, the chances that the specific policy being protested is part of an overall vision even remotely similar to this are about on par with the chances of one of my roommate's pet geckos getting elected Pope.
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TiltsAreUnderrated
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« Reply #17 on: January 12, 2023, 03:59:40 PM »
« Edited: January 12, 2023, 04:03:28 PM by TiltsAreUnderrated »

The presupposition that goes into this approach, which is itself reasonable if you concede that presupposition, is that other aspects of current work culture like working conditions and working hours have to stay the way they are, in other words, that no matter how much automation happens we still have to prop up or even increase the total amount of time people spend working.

That's not the only valid presupposition. There's still value in raising the pension age even if all basic needs can be met with fewer workers than before.

As consumers, voters are going to keep valuing cheaper stuff and policies they believe will deliver cheaper stuff (and curbing consumerism is well beyond Macron's capabilities). Unfortunately, this often translates into an incentive to squeeze workers. The incentive is most strongly counterbalanced by the fact that voters are also workers. This incentive is absent for pensioners. If the proportion of the electorate which draws the state pension rises, the electorate is likely to make things worse for workers.

Quote
Giving people more time to do things other than work is a foundational leftist goal going back hundreds, maybe even thousands, of years. Let's not just give up on it now of all times in history.

I agree. We should have a four or three-day workweek, and more 62-year-olds should have a stake in making this happen.

This is a reasonable argument, but based on Macron's now-extensive track record of crass rightism masquerading as enlightened liberal post-post-post-ideological galaxy brain, the chances that the specific policy being protested is part of an overall vision even remotely similar to this are about on par with the chances of one of my roommate's pet geckos getting elected Pope.

Macron can (and sadly, will) be as ghoulish as he pleases, but the structural impact of this policy (on the electorate, that is) remains the same. A greater proportion of it will now have an incentive to support pro-worker policies.

Edit: I'll easily take this over what the UK Conservatives are doing, which is extolling the virtues of the triple locked pensions while making it harder to strike.
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angus
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« Reply #18 on: January 13, 2023, 09:17:39 AM »
« Edited: January 13, 2023, 10:05:31 AM by angus »

http://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/01/10/france-macron-to-push-for-pension-reform-again-despite-potential-strikes.html
A neccesary reform but the Fr*nch are sadly too dumb . Fortunately Macron is ignoring the will of the idiots .

Quote
Macron is serving his second term as France's president but overhauling the pension system is a long-standing promise that dates all the way back to when he was first elected in 2017.

France's legal retirement age is currently 62 — lower than many developed markets, including much of Europe and the U.S. The public sector also has "special regimes," or sector-specific deals that allow workers to retire before they're 62.

They have been talking about this reform for years.  Since at least 2017.  We'll see if it actually manifests.  It probably will.  It should be noted that the French president has more executive authority than many others, including the US president.  Before presidential terms were cut from seven years to five, some political analysts likened the French presidency to the absolute monarchy of the ancien régime.  He appoints the prime minister and members of the constitutional council.  He can dissolve the national assembly.  He can submit bills directly to referenda.  He can even bypass the national assembly on certain matters described in article 11 of the constitution of the fifth republic.  I'd imagine that he can find a way to enact pension reform.  I suspect the reason he didn't do it in his first mandate was because he want to be re-elected.  Now that he has been, there's no reason not to.  

Where the French pension system differs from most others is that it is convoluted by exceptions, requirements for number of years worked, and the fact that it has 42 separate plans, which results in its requiring 14% of the national GDP to sustain it.  They should also use this moment to simplify all that, but from all that I have read it seems that Elisabeth Borne's plans are no less convoluted than the old system.  

The other thing to keep in mind is that according to the French government, the pension system is not in dire financial straits.  They actually produced surpluses in 2021 and 2022, but it also estimates deficits of about 10 billion euro per year from 2023 to 2034 (without reform).  The options are raising the age, reducing the benefits, raising taxes, means testing (which they already do), or just letting the debts pile up (which probably runs afoul of European Union regulations).  Raising the age is probably the best option.  That, along with importing younger workers from North Africa and other places.  Or make more babies.

The smart move would have been to have Elisabeth Borne speak publicly about raising the lower age limit from 62 to 65 or 66.  CFDT and other organizations call on their members to mobilize.  The government comes in and sits down to the table with the union bosses and they agree to raise it only to 64, which makes for a neat compromise.  She sort of did that, but it wasn'tt efficiently orchestrated.  Remember that Macron is getting pushback from the right as well.  Many capitalists and business leaders are concerned about the proposal to raise benefits.  He has Les Républicains (mostly) on board, but they only occupy 148 seats in the legislature, so Macron will want to grease some of the rightist and leftist members if he wants to avoid resorting to article 49.3 again. (It was after all Eric Ciotti, head of LR, who convinced Borne to back off the original plan of raising the age to 65.  Trop sévère, he called it.)  The center-right and the far right parties generally support the reform for budgetary reasons, but the devil is in the details.


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angus
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« Reply #19 on: January 15, 2023, 11:04:15 PM »

Get ready for riots. Macron trying to increase pension age in France

Well, not quite a riot, but a manifestation.

https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2023/01/15/reforme-des-retraites-ces-quinquagenaires-qui-n-arrivent-pas-a-s-imaginer-travailler-jusqu-a-64-ans_6157918_823448.html

Note that quinquagénaires means fifty-somethings, more or less.  The line about "L’exécutif, qui envisageait un report à 65 ans pour sa réforme-phare, a donc mis de l’eau dans son vin." says that the executive wanted to increase the retirement age to 65, but ended up putting "water in his wine".  I suppose that's an idiomatic French way of saying that he toned it down a little (changing it to 64, which is exactly the way I would have done it [vide supra] were I in charge.)

I think they'll just have to learn to drink that wine.  Even Porthos, in Les Trois Mousquetaires, learned to handle the watered-down Margot offered him by the husband of a pretty woman he was trying to seduce, though he was clearly disgusted by the stinginess of the husband of that woman.

Le Monde is calling for responses.  It's a bit sensationalistic, but it does show that workers are not happy about the situation.  The second person interviewed says that we will "passer du boulot à l'EPHAD."  (go straight from working to the retirement home)  I think that is the key.  There has been a growing expectation (in France, but the US and other countries as well) that one should have a long period between leaving one's work and being on the deathbed.  That, I think, underscores the problem.  We are not cavemen who need to fight against sabertooth cats every waking moment, but we are not yet interstellar explorers with an economy and a technology so advanced that we can speak "tea, earl grey, hot" into the food replicator and expect it to deliver.  Growing pains.  For all of us.  

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TheDeadFlagBlues
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« Reply #20 on: January 16, 2023, 11:46:56 AM »
« Edited: January 16, 2023, 11:53:04 AM by TheDeadFlagBlues »

Pension costs are simply too high in France, which requires some reform if we are being honest. I disagree strongly with Macron’s approach, however. I think a superior approach might be to make early retirement more liberal, along with making it easier to claim what amount to old age disability benefits at an earlier age. This could be combined with pension benefit cuts at the maximum, which would chiefly affect higher earners. The full retirement age could be raised.

I think that white collar workers in France should be encouraged to work longer. It is incredibly wasteful for public sector employees to be encouraged to retire in their early 60s and it is silly for private sector white collar workers to have the same incentives. My main concern is that pension reforms have a tendency to punish manual workers. Improved health does not imply that they are any more able to work in old age. It is incredibly unreasonable to ask them to retrain, as their life expectancy tends to be lower. Pension reforms in countries where pension outlays are extremely high can trim costs while maintaining access for the working class. I would also argue that public pensions should be more egalitarian, with benefits being more decoupled from ‘credits’.
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Zinneke
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« Reply #21 on: January 16, 2023, 12:40:38 PM »

The neoliberalism is strong with this thread (and of course now the fish will start telling me that "water" is a meaningless buzzword).


French trade unions have a reputation for neverending strikes, militancy, refusal to compromise and byzantine feuds (Britain has one trade union federation; France has eight). This makes them a darling of leftists, but they forget that only 8% of French workforce are members of a union: literally the lowest percentage anywhere in the EU and lower than even the US. Maybe there's a connection there.

Usually I'm not a fan of union busting, but most of the people who will be marching on the streets against this reform are parasites who don't care about representing workers, only about protecting their sweet little privileges.

Jesus F**king Christ.

You're usually better than this. Please take a second to think through what you're saying.

There we have it folks, the effortless superiority of the Academic Left that has cost us dearly the past few years. We are all too dumb for Antonio to explain to us why we're wrong and we should all be paying into the glorified pension Ponzi scheme designed for boomer
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TheDeadFlagBlues
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« Reply #22 on: January 16, 2023, 12:55:48 PM »

Adding to my previous post, I am less critical about raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 and far more critical of increasing the total number of years someone must work to receive a full pension, which will primarily harm "marginally attached" workers who tend to be much poorer and much more in need of a pension.

For those unsympathetic to workers annoyed by this, consider this rather banal statement of opposition from a bricklayer:
Quote
Working as a bricklayer, it’s already a bit of a tall order getting to 60 in good health, even if you have a reduced workload. All day long, you’re coming up against oil, grease, cement, dust, everything there is in the building industry. You’re hammering all the time; it’s very hard on your body. A lot of my colleagues end up with cancer at 60. And even if you don’t get cancer, from the age of 50 onwards, you get bad knees, a bad back, carpal tunnel, damaged ligaments – you name it

Another comment from a 22 year old:
Quote
. The aim is to save money, to make the country produce more, to lower companies’ contributions and make people work longer. It’s the poor who are going to be affected, especially since a quarter of the poorest men are already dead by the age of 62 – which is of course scandalous.

Any pension reform needs to be fair and just to manual workers, paying particular attention to those at the bottom of the income distribution. The problem with Macron's reform is that it really makes no concessions to these workers. Once again, France's President of the Rich pursues a reform that punishes these people, while he continues to pursue policies to benefit elites in France. Pension reforms are obviously necessary in France but this is not an approach I favor.
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« Reply #23 on: January 16, 2023, 12:59:54 PM »


Jesus F**king Christ.

You're usually better than this. Please take a second to think through what you're saying.

Most intellectual communist argument
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DavidB.
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« Reply #24 on: January 17, 2023, 06:10:33 AM »

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France's legal retirement age is currently 62 — lower than many developed markets, including much of Europe and the U.S.
Curious why CNBC think France is a "market". It's a country.
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