Great Graphic: France's Slide

Here is a Great Graphic posted on Zero Hedge, which in turn came from JP Morgan research.  It highlights several economic time series from France that shows the deterioration of the French economy since the start of last year.   

It dovetails nicely with our recent note on France.   Our thesis is that with structural reforms taking place  in much of the periphery, including a decline in unit labor costs, France is losing competitiveness from "below" and has been unable to keep up with German producers from "above".    

We suspect the European debt crisis will not be over until France too undergoes a retrstructuring that was forced on Germany after the Berlin Wall fell and is being forced on the peripheral countries by uncoordinated, though not completely separate pressure from the Troika and investors.  

We do take exception with the red vertical line that identifies a large lead that Hollande over Sarkozy in opinion polls.  First, that lead did not take place overnight and is a bit of political editorializing.  It seeks as the title of suggests to imply that there has been some important shift in the economy under Hollande from Sarkozy.   Second, the key event of that period around that horizontal line is the two interest rate cuts and the LTROs from the European Central Bank.