Welcome to the Euro Intelligence Podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me are Zuzana Muncheng and Jack Smith.

Today we will talk about fiscal policy, fiscal constraints that are kicking in everywhere.

Fiscal constraints that affect policy commitments we made on green policies, as we just saw in the UK,

but also fiscal

constraints are starting to impede our foreign policies and security policies.

One example we wrote about in Eurointelligence this week is the debate in the EU about

whether to confiscate Russian reserve assets.

Most of Russian reserves, the bulk of Russian

reserves is held in euros. It's parked in the EU. So this is a decision that would affect

the EU disproportionately. The euro being not as a leading a global currency as the dollar,

it raises a question whether it has an impact on the currencies.

We see the question in France.

Zuzana, you wrote about the fiscal debate that's currently in France and also an interesting

comment you made about Macon having a very different attitude to fiscal policy than, say,

the Germans do, believing that he said, you know, his view is that growth would take care of everything.

Are we headed from some kind of a clash, some kind of divergence, or is this just talk and the reality is actually a different one?

I do think that this is part of a bigger divide that is becoming much more clearer over the coming years.

Emmanuel Macron is not unique in terms of French politician to say

the growth will take care of my deficit.

I think as long as you don't have a constitutional break,

I think the other words, the Germans wouldn't have done that either.

It's just the force of the constitutional break

...