And me, what does it change?

Where it comes through

Four places where the debt touches your life

Your savings

What €100 became

State debt is also an investment: many French people hold it without knowing, in the euro fund of their life insurance. To judge that investment it has to be compared with something else over a long period. Here are €100 placed in a given year and followed to the end of 2025, in euros of the time, under six ways of keeping them.

What each one protects you from, and exposes you to

The risk shared by all euro holdings

Three of these holdings, State bonds, the Livret A and notes, promise euros, not purchasing power. If the euro loses value, because prices rise or because it falls against other currencies, they lose together, and the euro fund of life insurance with them. It has happened twice since 2010. Between 2011 and 2015, while the European Central Bank was supporting States in difficulty, the euro lost 20% against the dollar without prices moving. In 2022, prices rose 5.2% in a year, the sharpest rise since 1990. A central bank can always help a State that borrows too much by buying its debt; the cost can then shift onto the currency, and onto everyone who holds it. Gold and US shares do not share that fate, for better or for worse: they have their own risks, described above. This site does not predict what the euro will do; it only notes that public debt and French savings are in the same currency.

• The past does not tell the future: these curves describe what happened, not what will happen.
• This is not a comparison of real products: no fees, no taxes (except the tax-free Livret A), no life-insurance taxation, no property. Shares are represented by their indices with gross dividends reinvested, which no saver quite gets: they pay fees and tax on dividends and gains.
• Bonds are modelled as a ladder: each year one tenth of the sum is reinvested at the ten-year yield of the moment and held to maturity, with interest reinvested. This is close to what a euro fund earns, before fees.
• Annual averages for prices, gold and yields; year-end values for shares. Interest is counted per full year. Gold and the S&P 500 are converted at the franc rate until 1998, the euro rate after.
• This site recommends no investment.

Sources: INSEE (prices, franc-euro converter since 1901), Eurostat (ten-year State yield, franc and dollar exchange rates), World Bank (gold price in dollars), Banque de France and Caisse des Dépôts (Livret A rate), Euronext (CAC 40 GR, year-end closes), Aswath Damodaran, NYU Stern (yearly S&P 500 return with dividends). Last full year: 2025. Gold in September 2026: €3,751 an ounce.

To decide

The questions the figures suggest asking

This site does not say who to vote for or what to do with your money. It gives you what you need to judge a promise. Faced with a programme, a budget or a candidate:

1. Which items does the plan touch? Social protection is 41% of spending; a plan that leaves it alone must say where it finds the rest.
2. How does it close the 3.8-point-of-GDP gap (€113bn a year) between today’s balance and the one that stabilises the debt, and over how many years?
3. What growth and rates does it assume? Since 1998, the programmes sent to Brussels have been about 2 points too optimistic on average two years out.
4. What happens if rates rise one point? For the State that is €19bn of extra interest a year by 2030.
5. Who lends, and at what price? More than half of State debt is held outside France; a plan that worries lenders is paid for in rates.