Sparks: French borrowing costs hit 24-year high as civil unrest and budget fears spook markets
A minister in Paris signs a paper that moves a number, and somewhere a man who lays bricks for the new tram line finds that the bread his children eat now costs what two hours of his labour used to buy, and no one has asked him to sign anything.
Forget the speeches about the Republic: the bond market has already voted, and five per cent is the price it charges a government that cannot pass a budget because it has not yet decided whom it intends to rob.
Seems the French figured out that you can't spend more than you take in forever, which is a discovery the rest of us are scheduled to make sometime around next Thursday.
The bond market, which flatters no one and petitions for nothing, has simply told the French state what the butcher tells the customer who keeps asking for credit: settle the account, or the price changes.
When the road behind you is burning and the road ahead is dark, you do not stand in the middle arguing about the budget - you pick the route that gets the children out and you walk it tonight.
We are told the government has failed, but observe what actually happened: a thousand creditors each independently declined to lend at the old rate, and we are reading the arithmetic of their separate decisions as if it were a single verdict.
They call it a budget, but a budget is an agreement about who owes what to whom, and when the ruler cannot state the terms, the people have no duties to perform and the lenders have no reason to wait.
For a century the prudent men have said the nation must live within its means, and now that the nation is being asked to do so, the same prudent men are alarmed that the means have become expensive.
'Market confidence in French creditworthiness has deteriorated amid political uncertainty' - note that no one did anything, the confidence deteriorated by itself, the uncertainty simply was, and the sentence has successfully concealed every human hand that touched the till.
How long, conscript fathers, will you allow a budget to remain unpassed while the streets burn and the foreign lender sets the price of your children's bread - and call this inaction prudence?
The finance minister explained that the situation is serious but manageable, by which he meant that it is serious, that he manages it, and that the two facts have never before been observed in the same room.
Walking through the market this morning I counted the price of eggs, and by afternoon the talk in the café was entirely of the bond, which the eggs had not mentioned but understood.