Livret A: Lecornu raises the ceiling, but popular savings stay at the counter

According to franceinfo, Sébastien Lecornu announced on Tuesday at the National Assembly that the ceiling on the livret A, the French tax-free savings account backed by the state, would be raised in February, within a range of €25,000 to €30,000, up from €22,950 today. The rate will also be raised, the Prime Minister specified, without giving figures. The exact ceiling, the level of the rate and the precise date are not yet known.

That's the facts. The rest is our reading.

One could see this as a gift to small savers, and it is one, a modest one. But look at the mechanics. The livret A is a channel managed by the state: households' money sleeps there, reassured by the public guarantee, and comes back out as financing, notably for social housing. Nothing shameful in that. The political question is why workers are so politely invited to save more, when wages do not get the same uplift. The briefing says nothing about salaries. Nor will we pretend otherwise: we are merely noting the silence.

Marx, in Capital, mocked this "gospel of saving and abstinence" preached to the worker. His answer was simple: the worker has only one possession, his labour power, and he is already economising it, thank you, by refusing to have it worn down to the bone. Raising a ceiling presupposes that you have something to fill it with. Yet 25,000 or 30,000 euros in a savings account is a horizon for a minority of households. For many others, the livret A is the end-of-month mattress, emptied before it has ever been filled.

There is also the angle the Prime Minister did not spell out: who benefits from popular savings remaining confined to deposits? A regulated deposit is safe, low-risk, and its return is administered. Meanwhile, banks and credit are reshaping themselves elsewhere, with other products, other margins, other clients. Keeping workers' savings nicely warm in a deposit is also placing them at the disposal of a financing system they do not control. We raise the question without claiming to hold the answer: the briefing offers no elements for one.

The underlying logic, meanwhile, is familiar. Productivity gains do not always reach the payslip; so the worker is invited to build his own security, euro by euro, through virtue. Pensions, unemployment, sickness: so many collective protections that we would like to see replaced by individual prudence, nicely rated. "Liberté, égalité, fraternité", says the motto; what is on offer for now is "prudence, patience, a raised ceiling".

So let us wait for the rate and the date. If the livret A yields more, good news for those who have something to put in it. But a society that deems it urgent to enlarge the piggy bank rather than fill the purse has already picked its side.