Global stocks sank Wednesday after US President Donald Trump said he was not satisfied with talks that are aimed at averting a trade war with China. Equities were also dented by poor eurozone economic data, and as Trump cast doubt on a planned summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. “Trump (is) continuing to drive uncertainty over global trade,” said analyst Joshua Mahony at trading firm IG. “European markets are following their Asian counterparts lower, as a pessimistic tone from Trump is compounded by downbeat economic data,” he added. Markets had surged Monday after US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He said they had agreed to pull back from imposing threatened tariffs on billions of dollars of goods, and continue talks on a variety of trade issues. However, Trump has declared that he was “not satisfied” with the status of the talks, fuelling worries that the world’s top two economies could still slug out an economically pain...
France has long been in the EU’s crosshairs over its deficit, which has repeatedly overshot an EU limit of three percent of gross domestic product.
Macron, who is pushing for a profound transformation of the EU, has slashed public spending in a bid to restore France’s credibility, driving down the deficit to an estimated 2.9 percent in 2017 — the first time in a decade it will come in at under three percent.
In an interview with France’s Europe 1 radio Economic Affairs Commissioner Pierre Moscovici urged Macron not to rest on his laurels and to continue reforming France’s big-spending ways.
“Emmanuel Macron wants to be… the leader in Europe and to be the leader in Europe, you must show example,” he said.
“Three percent is not a target, it’s an absolute limit,” the former French economy minister said, adding that while he was satisfied his country was no longer the “dunce” of the eurozone its deficit was still far in excess of the eurozone average.
“The average deficit in the eurozone is not 2.8 or 2.7 percent it’s 0.9 percent,” he noted.
The French government has forecast a deficit of 2.8 percent in 2018 — a figure seen as somewhat optimistic by Brussels which expects it to remain at 2.9 percent before inching back up to 3 percent in 2019.
“France is doing better, it is doing better on its deficit, it is doing better on growth.
“But France must aim very high, it must aim for the top spot,” Moscovici, a Socialist, urged, calling for a “very strong deficit reduction”
His call comes at the end of a week in which France’s Court of Auditors — the public spending watchdog — also warned that the eurozone’s second-biggest economy was not on a sound footing deficit-wise.
“Even with a deficit under the three percent limit, France still has one of the worst financial situations among almost all its eurozone partners,” the court’s president Didier Migaud warned, calling for faster structural reforms.
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