It first seems reasonable to me to avoid, in this matter and at this stage, any Treaty change. We could keep the 3% deficit target, which is a useful anchor, and even the 60% debt target. But the rule of a 1/20 annual linear adjustment towards the latter target has become unrealistic because it is too strict, especially for highly indebted countries. And, instead of the structural deficit which no one really understands, or even knows how to calculate accurately we could set a ceiling on the growth rate of public spending as an operational target. At constant tax rates, this amounts to much the same thing in economic terms, and was the main thrust of the reform put forward in 2019 by the European Budget Committee (EBC) chaired by Niels Thygesen. These rules should not simply be seen as a constraint imposed by Brussels, but should be widely internalised, 'taken up' in our French budgetary debate, as they are in our national interest. 2. Adding a European stabilisation and investment capacity Allow me to imagine a successful exit from the forthcoming tough European and Franco-German - negotiations: the southern European countries - including France - accept domestic rules for fiscal discipline; the northern countries including Germany - accept a European fiscal capacity.
For the path of the Swedish economy in the coming years, no other single factor is therefore anything like as important as the total wage trend. The picture of the negotiations that are now beginning is mixed and tensions do exist. Since the previous survey in September, all the interviewed groups’ expectations of the annual wage rise have been revised upwards for all time horizons. Wage expectations are highest among the employee organisations. Moreover, the wage demands that have been presented are higher than before the previous round of negotiations. It is evidently becoming more difficult to find people with the appropriate competence for the jobs that are advertised. This presumably makes the risk of future wage drift greater than in previous years. All this could be a sign that we are approaching a situation where, bit by bit, aggregate wage costs in the Swedish economy start to accelerate, albeit from moderate levels. •  When it comes to judging inflationary pressure in the coming years, a central concept is total resource utilisation. The available amount of unutilised resources is crucial for the domestic generation of inflationary pressure, at least as long as inflation expectations are parked around our 2% target. In the coming years it is highly probable that, for the first time in a long while, our estimates of total resource utilisation - the output gap - will show that the gap has closed and the economy has reached or even moved above the capacity ceiling.