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The story
The 5ch “News Flash+” board picked up on a Nikkei report about mounting anxiety over France’s sovereign bond ratings. On top of ballooning government debt and rising social security costs, political turmoil ahead of the spring 2027 presidential election has fueled a bond sell-off — markets have even coined the sardonic nickname “FROGS trade.” The thread was full of anxious comments like “isn’t this Japan’s not-so-distant future too,” and also saw a lively back-and-forth over immigration policy and the origins of the acronym PIIGS.
[Paris — Shogo Kodama, London — Akira Yamashita] Market wariness over French government bonds continues. Beyond the political turmoil, France is weighed down by a fiscal deficit that now exceeds that of southern European countries like Spain, which triggered the 2010s European debt crisis. With the spring 2027 presidential election approaching, uncertainty hangs over the outlook.
The “FROGS trade” — a sardonic nickname for trading in French government bonds now circulating in the markets. “France’s Oversized Government and Socia…(continues in the paid edition; 1,556 characters remain)
Nikkei, October 12, 2026, 11:00
Source: nikkei.com / Original article here
What people said
Japan's interest rates are shooting up too.
Folks at the bottom are suddenly whining about rent going up, as if it's news 😅
In that case, is Hiroyuki-sensei coming back to Japan then?
Japan's even worse, what are you even talking about lol
Apparently Hiroyuki's launching a new party to run in the next unified local elections,
so he's coming back to Japan after all
Ireland and Iceland joined the PIGS lineup
There are two I's, aren't there —
the countries born out of the subprime/Lehman-triggered European debt crisis:
Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain
Iceland was actually worse off, but maybe it got left out for being too small a country — though with three I's it'd fit too
Singapore's handling it well.
After all, if a foreign worker loses their job or gets pregnant, they get deported.
The US is actually doing an even better job of it, though.
All that's left behind is worse public safety and a divided society.
If immigrants were increasing naturally that'd be one thing, but forcibly bringing in huge numbers as national policy throws the balance off
Despite fiscal troubles, they're housing huge numbers of illegal immigrants (who don't work) on the taxpayer's dime, and this year they announced plans to double down on it.
Even France hasn't had Muhammad as the #1 newborn baby name for five years running yet lol
They say the UK might overtake Japan's GDP despite having a much smaller population — what's it actually living off of?
I don't get the impression they're big on manufacturing or anything, though maybe I just don't know enough.
They don't have anything like GAFA either. I guess speaking English is just that big an advantage on its own
Not totally sure, but is this a low-burden, high-welfare setup?
It's high-burden, high-welfare.
But there's a mix of factors piling up for France too — longer lifespans and pricier, more advanced medical care pushing up social security costs,
higher spending from supporting Ukraine,
and rising interest payments from the worsening fiscal picture
I heard unemployment benefits can run up to 27 months there
What's needed is cutting excessive welfare and bloated administration
That's reverting to beastly survival-of-the-fittest.
I'd rather humanity's regression not happen until after I'm dead
If you cut social security and push it onto individuals, it's the working-age generation that ends up struggling with money the most, though.
That said, just like Thailand and South Korea in the Asian financial crisis, or Greece in the subprime/Lehman-triggered European debt crisis,
a country can't ever clean up its own act without outside pressure, like being put under IMF oversight (unless a civil war on the scale of the Meiji Restoration is an acceptable price)
Germany, the UK, and the Netherlands were chipping in to prop France up
↓
The UK left, so the support money got cut
These days Germany's economy is a mess too
And Japan already got overtaken by that same Germany in GDP.
The side effects of all that extraordinary monetary easing are coming due
I read somewhere that even when Macron wants to cut spending, protesters riot so hard he can't actually do it lol
Whenever you go to cut something, you've got to slap a label on the vested-interest groups, win public opinion over, and spin like crazy before you can actually cut it
It's the leftists who think rioting fixes everything that are breaking the country
Next year the far-right's Le Pen becomes president, so maybe she'll crack right down on the protests lol, looking forward to it lol
But then again, if you ask whether Japan — which hasn't taken in immigrants — is doing well, well…
In the first place, they're just using immigration to paper over about 40 years of policy failures.
Immigration is just a band-aid fix — in the long run it'll end up like France
It's already proven that bringing in immigrants doesn't work out,
so there's no need to follow that same playbook regardless.
Even if failure is inevitable, there's a huge gap between failing while stuck with immigrants and constant riots like France, and failing without that
The Roman Empire fell from a massive influx of immigrants.
The EU is basically aiming to be a modern-day Roman Empire
Background and Key Points of This Topic
PIIGS is an acronym for Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain — the countries whose fiscal troubles were most severe during the 2010s European debt crisis. Now that French bond yields have surpassed those countries’, markets have coined a new, mocking nickname for France: the “FROGS trade.” Many commenters in the thread drew parallels between France’s fiscal deterioration and Japan’s own future, but the article doesn’t mention a key structural difference: France is a eurozone member that can’t control its own monetary policy, whereas Japan issues bonds in its own currency with the Bank of Japan holding the reins on monetary policy — so the comparison isn’t quite as simple as it looks.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (News Flash+) thread “France Now the ‘Sick Man of Europe’ — Interest Rates Surpass PIIGS, Bond Sell-Off Amid Political Instability.”
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