The management of France's foreign debt 1980-1990.

Summary From the threat of an international financial crisis, the possibility of a generalized banking crash, the threat of repudiation of international debts, demands for a moratorium. The international debt crisis seems to seriously threaten the whole system: the Euromarkets are stagnating and banks are readjusting their credit lines and retracting, and the dollar is soaring. It is in this context that France, following its political changeover, chose and implemented a debt policy designed at the outset as an emergency and transitory adjustment instrument. But little by little this instrument asserts itself as an element of economic policy according to a well-developed system. During the period under study, the problem of France's external debt was not a constant feature. The years of massive recourse to foreign capital make the debt a public problem posed according to a logic of staggered flows that favors the balance of these flows in the framework of the balance of payments. From the discovery of the harmful effects on France's external financial relations, there followed a phase of economic rigor completed by the liberalization of the economy and by a movement of debt reduction initiated by the state itself. From then on, companies regained their freedom of action. This is the phase where a real management strategy is implemented following a micro logic and based on the criteria of financial optimization and dynamic choice with definition of the horizons, reasoning in terms of costs by integrating the time factor by a discount rate.