An initial confidence that the global crisis would spare France is eroding. A poll taken Wednesday and Thursday of about 1,000 adults and published Friday in Le Figaro found that 80 percent of the French expected “a grave economic crisis” at home. Some 94 percent expected the United States to undergo such a trauma. Sixty-six percent said that Mr. Sarkozy’s government could not protect France from the aftershocks, and only 14 percent that it could.
Eric Le Boucher, an economist and editor, said Thursday that “it’s frustrating for Europeans to think they are paying for the excesses of the American financial system,” according to Jacques Mistral, head of economic studies at the French Institute of International Relations.
Élie Cohen, director of research at the Center for Political Research at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, known as Sciences Po, and a member of the government’s Council of Economic Advisers, was blunter. “There’s certainly an idea that the American financial system has gone crazy,” he said in an interview. “This has dealt a mortal blow to the timid admiration we had of the American system. But not even the most conservative French person is capable of defending it anymore.”
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France, Its Economy Limping, Worries About Financial Shock Wave From Across Atlantic
An initial confidence that the global crisis would spare France is eroding. A poll taken Wednesday and Thursday of about 1,000 adults and published Friday in Le Figaro found that 80 percent of the French expected “a grave economic crisis” at home. Some 94 percent expected the United States to undergo such a trauma. Sixty-six percent said that Mr. Sarkozy’s government could not protect France from the aftershocks, and only 14 percent that it could.
Eric Le Boucher, an economist and editor, said Thursday that “it’s frustrating for Europeans to think they are paying for the excesses of the American financial system,” according to Jacques Mistral, head of economic studies at the French Institute of International Relations.
Élie Cohen, director of research at the Center for Political Research at the Paris Institute of Political Studies, known as Sciences Po, and a member of the government’s Council of Economic Advisers, was blunter. “There’s certainly an idea that the American financial system has gone crazy,” he said in an interview. “This has dealt a mortal blow to the timid admiration we had of the American system. But not even the most conservative French person is capable of defending it anymore.”
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