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France runs out of cash until end of the year

The Local France
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France runs out of cash until end of the year
France will have to top up its credit cards until the end of the year.

From midnight on Monday until the end of the year France will have to use borrowed money after spending all of the €390 billion it raised through taxes, a new survey showed on Monday

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From Tuesday until the end of the year - a full 53 days - France will have to survive on credit.

In other words the country has blown the €390 billion in tax receipts earned this year and will now have to add to the two trillion euros of debt on its credit cards, with this year's spending set to hit €460 billion.

That’s the conclusion drawn by survey from the liberal think tank the Molinari Institute that looked at the 28 member states of the EU and calculated the day when each one has spent all their tax receipts.

For France 2015 will be the 35th consecutive year it has run an imbalanced budget

According to the institute “France is one of the rare countries, along with Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland and Slovakia, to build up debts in all three areas of the administration – central state, local authorities and social security.”

The study includes a chart which shows the date when each country has spent its incomings and while France is November 9th, it is not far ahead of Britain which runs out of money on November 11th.

Ireland will go into debt on November 23th, while Italy hits the red two days earlier. Sweden will still have some money in its pockets until December 15th, while Germany and Denmark will actually have some cash left over at the end of the year.

On average EU states have spent all their tax receipts 37 days before the end of the year, whereas back in 2009 they had blown the budget 72 days before New Year’s Eve. However before the financial crisis kicked off in 2008, EU states had money to spend until just 19 days before the end of the year.

Cecile Philippe, director of the Molinari Institute, whose studies paint France’s economy in a bad light, said: “Unlike the rest of the EU, French public spending continues to grow. It has now reached 57.5 percent of GDP.

“This gap between France and the rest of the EU shows the scale of the challenges in a country where it is common to stigmatize 'budgetary austerity'."

“We have got to a point where we have an unequal level of spending and tax revenues, which only multiplies the negative effects and hampers the chances of a sustainable recovery that will allow us to drastically reduce unemployment.”

In September 2014 it was revealed that France’s public debt had passed the symbolic two trillion mark. In real numbers that's €2,000,000,000,000.

The only positive thing for France is that it is still able to borrow money at record low interest rates.

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