After the Olympics, France has to face its grim reality

The French television personality Laurent Baffie, interviewed by Le Figaro, came up with a nice phrase for the success beyond most expectations of the Paris Olympics: it had been ‘une parenthèse enchantée’, he said, but parentheses always have to close and ‘la merde va revenir’. I’m guessing he meant France’s brief political truce will end and attention will refocus on economic woes, even after a slight fall in unemployment – to 7.3 per cent, compared with the UK rate of 4.4 per cent – that was announced as another ‘bonne surprise’.

Writing from the Dordogne, where lunch is long and markets that matter are not global and financial but local and focused on tomatoes and melons, I hope you’ll forgive me if I take Baffie’s cue and offer a sunny interlude. La merde will hit the fan for sure in the autumn: in riot-scarred Britain, Trump-torn America and all across Europe as far as the Ukrainian front. But just for this week, I’m inclining to the brighter side.

Microcredit hero

One cause for optimism is the emergence of Muhammad Yunus as interim leader of Bangladesh after the ousting of the autocratic Sheikh Hasina. Yunus is a rare phenomenon: a Nobel laureate economist whose practical ideas have helped lift many thousands of people out of poverty. Another, though more controversial, is Hernando de Soto (once a presidential candidate in his own home country, Peru) who advocates awarding to squatters and street traders property rights that can be used to secure loans. Both men realised that access to credit – nowadays often seen as dangerous in the developed world – is essential for the most basic level of subsistence business-building.