French Business Lobby Not Happy With 2014 Budget

Despite the pro-business tone of France’s 2014 budget, the country’s largest business lobbying group said the proposals presented by the government on Wednesday were a blow for competitiveness, growth and jobs.

“We’ve got a problem with this French budget,” Pierre Gattaz , the head of France’s Mouvement des entreprises de France (MEDEF), told CNBC, following the government’s budget presentation, which announced 15 billion euros ($20.2 billion) of spending cuts and 3 billion euros of tax increases.

Although the tax hikes will mainly hit households and consumers – via higher sales taxes and social insurance contributions — the budget also included a new levy on operating profits and a 75 percent tax rate on salaries of more than 1 million euros, to be paid by companies rather than employees.

via CNBC

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Alfonso Esparza

Alfonso Esparza

Senior Currency Analyst at Market Pulse
Alfonso Esparza specializes in macro forex strategies for North American and major currency pairs. Upon joining OANDA in 2007, Alfonso Esparza established the MarketPulseFX blog and he has since written extensively about central banks and global economic and political trends. Alfonso has also worked as a professional currency trader focused on North America and emerging markets. He has been published by The MarketWatch, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail, and he also appears regularly as a guest commentator on networks including Bloomberg and BNN. He holds a finance degree from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM) and an MBA with a specialization on financial engineering and marketing from the University of Toronto.
Alfonso Esparza