Implicit Rent: The Yield Owner-Occupiers Never Calculate
Owner-occupiers pay themselves an in-kind implicit rent, a real but rarely measured flow worth around 10% of French GDP. This analysis explains how it reshapes the buy-versus-rent comparison.
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Rate Hikes: Who Gets Hit First?
Variable-rate borrowers absorb a rate hike within weeks; fixed-rate borrowers remain insulated for years. This heterogeneity, hidden in aggregate statistics, explains the contradictory diagnoses around each tightening cycle.
Inflation, Growth, and Rates: Lagged Reactions
Financial markets, GDP, and inflation each respond to monetary policy on their own clock. The gap between peak effects on growth and inflation runs two to four quarters — a sequence rooted in nominal rigidities.
Why Markets React Before the Real Economy
Financial markets price in monetary decisions in minutes; the real economy adjusts over quarters. This temporal divergence reflects two fundamentally different modes of integrating monetary information.
Macro Regimes and Real Rates: Reshaping Household Decisions
Saving, borrowing and investment decisions shift with the prevailing real-rate, inflation and liquidity regime. Three distinct macro configurations produce three different household logics — and the early-2026 neutral-rate environment leaves a narrower margin for error.
Dollar-Cost Averaging: Mechanics, Benefits and Limits
Dollar-cost averaging invests a fixed amount at regular intervals to smooth the entry price. Its main advantage is behavioural — neutralising timing paralysis — but its effectiveness assumes a long horizon and a market that recovers.
Does a Risk-Free Rate Really Exist? Three Hidden Risks
The risk-free rate is a theoretical convention, not an absolute guarantee. Three structural risks — inflation, residual sovereign risk and liquidity stress — remain obscured by the label.
Past Performance: Why It Provides False Reassurance
Past performance reflects a given market regime, not a future trend. This reading bias remains one of the most costly for retail investors.
The Livret A Is Neither Good Nor Bad: It Is a Function
The Livret A serves a function of liquidity and nominal security. Judging it on yield confuses the tool with the objective.
Active Funds, Index ETFs, Direct Securities: Three Routes to Market Access
Active funds, index ETFs and direct securities involve different fees, exposures and levels of delegation. What sets these three market access routes apart.