The 2008 crisis and the response of France in the European context

The objective of this thesis is to analyze what have been the impacts of the 2008 financial crisis in France and what were the direct reactions of the government to it. This analysis would be put in perspective by comparing it to the policies taken by various European neighbors. In the first part we analyze the cause of the crisis bubble-burst cycle and more precisely of the financial crisis. We conclude that a financial crisis comes from an accumulation of debt badly invest. We then study the example of the crisis of 1929 and the measure taken by the American government during the Great Depression through the New Deal. We explain that the measures not only planned on distributing money for the demand but set people to work and reformed the general economic environment. After studying the crisis of 2008 in the United State we see that even if the crisis began in the financial sector, its repercussion were felt on the entire economy. In the second part we analyze the main economic trends of France since World War Two. We will see that after thirty years of high growth and social development, the country was for thirty years on a downward trend of the economic development. We will study the case of unemployment, which is representative of the politic and economic system of France. We will realize that the different governments do not seem to be able to reform the country through sustainable measures that go beyond the impact of the announcement itself. We will then analyze the first effects of the crisis on the French economy to conclude that it resulted in the worsening of all the main macro-economic indexes, with the deepening of the debt and the development of a recession. We will then be able to compare those results to three major indexes of two other Europeans countries: the Czech Republic and Germany. We will see that those two countries, due to the importance of exportations on their national economies, and in the case of the Czech Republic, the importance of Germany, suffered more, in proportion, compared to France. In the third part we will study the measures taken by the French government in the aftermath of the crisis and the effects of those measures. We will see that if they plan to support the country through the help to the companies, the measure lack of long term planning. They are short terms measures that helped the country pass the worst of the crisis, but with long lasting effects on the country's debt. We will then compare them to the measures taken by the United Kingdom and Germany. Those two country are interesting to study since the British government made the choice of mainly directly supporting the consumption and Germany, with the largest European stimulus package was acting on all fronts. We will conclude that the main result for the two countries are the growing debt in percentage of GDP, but also that the long term effects are more taken into account in those two plans