Livret A: raise the ceiling, or how to make ordinary savings pay for the climate

Según franceinfo, the government intends to raise the Livret A ceiling in order to finance the climate adaptation of public infrastructure, lycées included. Still according to franceinfo, the measure leaves banks sceptical, against a backdrop of savers falling out of love with the product. The details of the new ceiling, the timetable and the allocation of funds do not appear in the dispatch we have: we will not invent them. What follows is our reading, not an established fact.

The question posed by franceinfo's headline, "à qui profite ?" (who benefits?), deserves to be taken seriously. Start with what is visible: a Livret A is salary set aside. For the most part, it is households that have already paid the rent, the shopping and the canteen, and who park the remainder in a guaranteed product. This saving is then pooled and lent, via the banks and the state, to projects in the general interest. The arrangement is ingenious: the state funds resilient lycées with the money of those whose children attend them. In public accounting this is called risk pooling; in less polite language, a loan made by employees to the collective body they already finance through taxation.

The banks, for their part, pull a face. Hardly surprising: a higher ceiling means more regulated deposits, and so less room to manoeuvre on investments that pay them more. Their scepticism is that of a sector watching a resource slip away, not that of a neutral observer. As for savers, their disaffection may say something simpler: when prices rise faster than the rate, a guarantee on capital starts to look like a slow, official erosion. We do not know what the dispatch says about this precisely; the reasoning, however, holds.

There is the question of surplus value, in the broad sense. Lycées adapted to heat will not generate profit directly, but they protect a collective apparatus, the one that trains and reproduces the labour force, which capital consumes without paying for it. In other words, wage savings finance the general conditions of future exploitation. The construction and energy firms that win the contracts, meanwhile, will pocket profit drawn from their workers' labour, with a modest interest rate paid to depositors by way of gratitude. The terms of these contracts are not yet known.

Finally, a remark on vocabulary. We read that "l'épargne se détourne" (savings turn away) from the Livret A, as if savings had moods. These are households making choices, with month-ends often shorter than their ambitions. Giving savings a will of its own is what we call fetishism: it erases the people behind the curve. The real beneficiaries of the increase will be counted once we know who is lending, at what rate, and for which projects. On this, the dispatch remains silent; we will return once the figures are out.