ATTENTION CONGRESS | Cut spending now, the time has arrived for fiscal sanity, don’t be the next France.

The eurozone debt crisis everyone wrote off is stirring again, and this time France is at the center.

France's 10-year yield premium over German bunds has blown out to about 140 basis points, the widest since 2012. Debt is pushing 117% of GDP, and the IMF warned about it for… pic.twitter.com/UkDxwyyQO3

— Kurt S. Altrichter, CRPS® (@kurtsaltrichter) October 12, 2026

Nobel winner Krugman says France may have become ‘too big to save’

France faces a potential debt crisis and may have become “too big to save” for the European Central Bank, according to Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman.

Student protests over underfunding in education continue to rock France, as Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu faces a struggle to pass a contentious 2027 budget that seeks to impose tens of billions of dollars’ worth of fiscal consolidation.

Writing in a Substack blog post on Thursday, Krugman said France was on a “fiscally unsustainable path,” facing mounting interest on its government debt while exacerbating its high debt-to-GDP ratio with large budget deficits.

A key issue is the country’s failure to address its relatively low retirement age as the population ages, he argued.

“France’s reliance on the euro means that it’s all too easy to see how this loss of confidence could turn into an ugly crisis… We saw this movie in 2009-2012, first in Greece, then in Portugal, Spain and Italy,” Krugman wrote, referring to the Sovereign Debt Crisis that spurred extensive intervention by the ECB.

h/t CFP