Bertille Bayard: "Can we beat the economic cycle?"

The German state sold the last Lufthansa shares it had bought in June 2020 to help the airline weather the huge crisis caused by the Covid outbreak.

Balance sheet: a capital gain of 760 million euros.

With this operation, Berlin has touched the holy grail of economic policy: spending when things are bad, and then rebuilding reserves when things are better, while waiting for the next blow.

Every Minister of the Economy dreams of beating the economic cycle in this way without endangering public finances in the long term.

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If we want to be chic, or techno, we talk about countercyclical politics.

In the banking world, for example, regulators have invented a “countercyclical buffer”.

We must not trust this deceptively cozy name inspired by the English word "buffer": it is in fact about the obligation imposed on banks, and always resented by them, to put capital in reserve to prepare bad days.

In the early days of the outbreak...

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