Otis Chandler

"What we're increasingly seeing is a reluctance of market participants to buy the taxation route as a viable way to reduce big fiscal deficits," said Russel Matthews, portfolio manager at RBC BlueBay Asset Management, which is betting against French bonds.

I don’t want to call the “young people are screwed” meme a myth, exactly. I want to call it a narrative . It’s a story that people are telling themselves, and the stories we tell about the world do shape the world. After all, affordability is the number-one buzzword in politics.

The average age of first-time home buyers recently hit a modern record of 40. Just as poor people buy lotto tickets when they feel their income is “low relative to an implicit standard,” perhaps young people today are drawn to get-rich-faster schemes precisely because middle-class hallmarks, such as homeownership and children, feel like luxuries... See more