France’s presidential wildcard? (Part Two)

Again, I’m speculating that, in view of the current French political mess, it might not be totally out of place to see Christine Lagarde running for president next April. Although she’s repeatedly stated throughout 2026 that she was "not a candidate for anything," her own remarks and the backdrop of the ongoing crisis suggest a figure intent on exerting influence within the national political debate. 

In announcing her early departure from the ECB, Lagarde explicitly cited the obligation of neutrality that had prevented her from weighing in on major political issues. She indicated a desire to regain her "freedom of speech and expression" in order to defend European principles—implicitly targeting the rise of the Marine Le Pen’s “Rassemblement National” (National Rally). Also, France is now weathering a financial storm, with public debt approaching 120% of GDP and borrowing costs (on 10-year French government bonds, or OATs) hovering near 5%. 

By leaving the ECB in February, she avoids the untenable position of having to manage a potential default or bailout of her own country from Frankfurt. Indeed, she has firmly stated that "the solution to France's debt problems lies in Paris, not at the ECB." As a "wild card" candidate Lagarde would be a rallying figure for the centrist, pro-Macron camp that has struggled to find a natural leader capable of standing to Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon. 

Christine Lagarde would tick many boxes as having an undisputed international stature as a former French Minister of the Economy, former head of the IMF, and current President of the ECB, she would embody the highest level of economic expertise at a time of fiscal crisis. Although she comes from the moderate right, she is perceived as being above the fray of traditional party politics. Public opinion polls consistently rank her among the most well-regarded public figures in France. 

As I discussed in my previous blog, she has a few skeletons in her closet and her image of technocratic elite with her highly international profile, closely tied to global financial institutions like the IMF and the ECB, could alienate a segment of the electorate, especially in a tense social climate marked by significant unrest. 

Obviously, lacking a political organization or "war machine", launching a campaign weeks before the April 2027 election might be insurmountable unless she is able “sell” or assuage long-established political figures like Édouard Philippe, Gabriel Attal, or Bruno Retailleau to step aside and support her as the “savior” of what might be a doomed political outcome. 

As expected, both the LFI (La France Insoumise) and the RN (Rassemblement National) immediately denounced her early resignation from the ECB as a strategic maneuver. They allege it was orchestrated in coordination with Emmanuel Macron to let him appoint a successor at the ECB before the end of his own presidential term, a move they see as a sign of disrespect toward the will of the French electorate. 

In summary, if Christine Lagarde is not (yet) an official candidate for the presidential election, her breaking free from the ECB job has deliberately positioned her as an essential moral and technical authority. Whether she emerges as a fallback candidate for the embattled political center or acts as a major influencer in the debate to block the extremes, she might be a key figure in France over the coming months. Let’s see what develops...

France’s presidential wildcard? (Part One)

When I see what goes on in France, I obviously wonder if Christianne Lagarde couldn’t become the “wild card”, or a centrist alternative in the face of France’s political and budgetary crisis, following her surprise announcement in late October 2026 that she would step down as President of the European Central Bank (ECB) on February 7, 2027—nine months before the end of her original term and just ahead of the April 2027 presidential election. 

Coincidence? Calculation? Your guess is as good as mine. Without questions, Christine Lagarde enjoys a highly respected international reputation, but her past in the French domestic politics closet contains several significant "skeletons" that political rivals could weaponize if she were to pursue a presidential bid. 

Her primary political baggage stems from her time as France’s Minister of the Economy, Finance, and Industry (2007–2011) under President Nicolas Sarkozy, alongside structural criticisms of her political identity. 

It starts with the Bernard Tapie’s negligence conviction by a special French court in December 2016. In 2007, Lagarde approved sending a long-running, multi-million-euro legal dispute between the state and controversial tycoon Bernard Tapie to a private arbitration panel rather than letting it proceed through the public courts. 

Tapie, my perennial “Bête Noire” was a flamboyant businessman who – when it suited him – was a vocal supporter of Nicolas Sarkozy, and had claimed he was defrauded by the state-owned bank Crédit Lyonnais during the 1993 sale of his stake in Adidas. In 2008, the private panel awarded Tapie a staggering €404 million in public funds (including €45 million in moral damages). Against the explicit warnings of her own ministry advisors, Lagarde decided not to appeal or challenge the massive payout. 

The arbitration award was later quashed by French courts as fraudulent and rigged. But in 2016, the Cour de Justice de la République (CJR), a special court that tries government ministers, found Lagarde guilty of "grave negligence". The court ruled that her hasty actions and failure to appeal showed an unpardonable lack of vigilance with taxpayer money. Though the court spared her from prison time or a fine due to her international standing, a "guilty" verdict for mismanaging public funds is an easy target for populist opponents. 

The left (LFI) and far-right (RN) would continue to paint her as a symbol of an unaccountable elite. The fallout from the Tapie case connects directly to a broader narrative used against her in France: that she is a creature of crony capitalism and acted under political pressure from Sarkozy to favor a wealthy political ally. For an electorate highly sensitive to economic inequality and the privileges of the ruling class, this remains a huge liability. 

Finally, as a former Finance Minister under Sarkozy and a chief architect of Eurozone policy, Lagarde cannot easily distance herself from France's current fiscal crisis. Some will also argue that a person who presided over early iterations of France’s deficit spending—and who has spent years lecturing nations from Washington and Frankfurt about fiscal discipline—lacks the credibility to solve the crisis at home. 

In a next blog we’ll see how she could manage to wiggle her way into the next French presidential election...

Why do we give up so easily ? (Part Two)

It’s clear that over the years we change, have different needs, develop new outlooks and with experience, accumulate much more wisdom too. We eventually learn to cope and deal differently with obstacles, impatience, unfamiliarity and a wide variety of pains or ordeals. We also learn that no situation is ever similar. 

We first do things for reasons that are not always important and valid and often this pushes us into dead ends that we couldn’t have imagined because we lacked imagination and a broader life experience. This observations lead to three particularly interesting reflections. First is all about persistence versus stubbornness. 

Knowing when to persevere and when to change direction is difficult to establish and to perceive. Giving up is not always a failure; sometimes it’s also how we acquire the wisdom that will light our path down the road. Then, there’s the undeniable role of accumulated experience as every time we overcome a difficult situation, we add to our personal database while building a little more confidence in our ability to face the next important decision along with its own challenges. 

To conclude, there’s the advantage of getting older and becoming increasingly more resourceful. It could be that one of the unexpected gifts of aging is that we become less frightened by temporary discomfort because we’ve seen enough of life to know that difficult periods don’t last forever and usually pass or become much more bearable. 

Finally, there is an idea that I think fits perfectly with my broader reflections on aging, curiosity and continuous self-improvement. Perhaps the real measure of personal growth isn't how many times we refuse to give up, but how much better we become at understanding when to hold on, when to let go, and when to start again. 

That intuitive flexibility is to me the real gem revealed as we discuss this subjet. It turns an essay about past indecision into something much more empowering: the possibility that we can keep learning how to persevere and get excellent at it, regardless of how many years we have already spent on this planet.

It's always with great interest that I scan my past experiences, hoping to uncover a little gem that I was unable to recognize or appreciate when certain events were actually taking place. More often than not, I come away with a treasure trove of insights that suddenly flash back into my consciousness, and I feel that this exercise is enormously beneficial. 

There is one particular trend that I have noticed, and it concerns how impatient, indecisive and unfocused I could be during many periods of my youth and early adulthood. 

I seemed to have a rather unfortunate tendency to give up on plans, projects and directions whenever pain, difficulty or discouragement began to cloud my judgment. My goals were there, but they were often too weakly defined and, more importantly, I was woefully unprepared for the obstacles standing between me and their achievement. 

Looking back, I realize that I spent far too much time navigating a world of doubt, fear and sometimes low self-esteem. I wanted to move forward, but I wasn't always equipped with the patience, determination or confidence to withstand the inevitable bumps along the way. 

Then I began asking myself: What was behind this behavior? Was it nature or nurture? Was I simply wired that way, or had my upbringing, environment and early experiences contributed to shaping these tendencies? I have often leaned toward the latter explanation, although I have never been entirely convinced. Perhaps the answer is more complicated than either explanation. 

Maybe it was a combination of temperament, circumstances, expectations and, above all, a lack of experience in dealing with adversity. I suspect that one of my biggest shortcomings was that I often fell in love with the destination without fully understanding the journey. I could picture what I wanted to accomplish, but I had little appreciation for the amount of patience, frustration, sacrifice and perseverance that might be required to get there. 

And isn't that one of the traps we frequently fall into? We confuse the difficulty of the journey with evidence that we have chosen the wrong destination. The moment things become uncomfortable, we start questioning our abilities, our decisions and sometimes even our original aspirations. 

Yet, difficulty is not necessarily a sign that something is wrong. Sometimes it is simply part of the admission price for getting somewhere worthwhile. One last question would be to see if over the years, age and experience make us respond in different ways to similar challenges. 

If this intrigues you, read the next blog…

Trump’s blindness and American exhaustion

For years, I’ve felt that Donald Trump’s leadership style — marked by bluster, self‑absorption, and an inability to imagine life from anyone else’s vantage point — was steering the country toward a breaking point. What finally caught up with him wasn’t just political opposition; it was the nation’s exhaustion. 

His presence saturated every corner of American life, every news cycle, every conversation, until people simply had enough. The recent election results were, in my view, a referendum on that fatigue. They were about him — unmistakably — and the public’s decision felt like a long‑overdue correction. It reconciled me with a majority of my fellow citizens who, at last, seemed to recognize the unsustainability of his approach. 

My own distrust of Trump began early, back in the 2015 primaries, when he chose insult over argument and spectacle over substance. I never believed in his claims of business genius, nor in the aura of infallibility he projected. His confidence often felt less like strength and more like a refusal to confront reality. 

The end of his first term offered a clear warning about the consequences of such leadership, and that warning only grew louder over time. Now, those in Congress and government members or big donors who aligned themselves with him face the difficult task of distancing themselves from the legacy they helped enable. 

Political stains are not easily washed away, especially when they come from years of enabling a leader whose style rewarded loyalty over judgment. I’ve always had a simple test for leadership: Would I trust this person to run my business? Even in 2015, the answer for Trump was an unequivocal no. 

Leadership requires persuasion, steadiness, and the ability to bring people along — qualities captured in the old saying that one catches more flies with honey than with vinegar. That wisdom feels more relevant than ever.

The clock that wouldn’t die

It’s at a famous French watchmaking institution that I got most of my education, so I watch timekeeping pieces like no ordinary person. In 2005, I noticed a cool looking atomic digital clock at a friend’s home in Reno and I bought the exact same one a couple of months later in January 2006, hanged it on our kitchen wall and loved it. 

Ever since, it gave us the absolutely exact time as well as displaying outdoor and indoor temperatures. The first problem occurred in 2018 when the clock stopped for no reason, but woke up after I slapped it. The incident repeated itself a few times in the interim and a few days ago as time changed from daylight saving, I removed the clock from the wall it was hanging, and it stopped.

Its LED screen dissolved from view never to reappear. So I repeated my previous routine like changing the batteries, pressing all the back buttons in various and different ways, before slapping it and then dropping the hapless clock on the floor but nothing woke it up. 

After a few minutes of this, I asked my wife to dump it into the garbage bin while I was ordering a replacement from Amazon. And the day went by… The following morning, I noticed the 3 AA batteries from the clock that I left on my desk and for no sensible reason thought “Let’s try once more”. 

I went to the garage, dove inside the large garbage bin, fished the clock, brought it to my office and re-installed the batteries, and… Bingo! The clock beeped and the screen reappeared as if by miracle. The device displaying the cold garage temperature was brought to life and soon thereafter after picking the atomic signal displayed almost the correct time, except for the new winter hour. 

This time, I kept the new clock that I’ve already received and now need to decide where in the house I should hang the 20+ year old clock... 

Embarking on immense projects (Part Two)

Is acceptance truly able to trigger difficult undertakings?" 

This sounds like a powerful principle of behavioral psychology and personal productivity. It means that acknowledging the reality of a hard task—including its stress, boredom, or complexity—is the precise spark needed to actually begin.

When we can stop fighting the idea of how difficult something will be, we free up the mental energy required to start doing it. I believe the way acceptance triggers action by defeating procrastination that’s rarely a time-management problem, but rather an emotional regulation problem. 

Accepting that a task will feel uncomfortable reduces our urge to avoid it. It also lowers our mental barrier and the layer of stress that goes with it, reducing that internal friction. As a result, it shifts the focus towards execution, shifting our brain from complaining to problem-solving. 

What’s needed to accept, is identifying and acknowledging explicitly the perceived discomfort. We need to convince ourselves that it will incredibly tedious, and not enjoyable, at least at first. We also need to accept that our initial progress might be messy or imperfect by giving us permission to build a terrible first draft just to get the momentum going. 

Finally, we need to focus exclusively on the smallest possible action required to initiate the work, such as doing a specific task no matter how small and insignificant it might seem. 

With that in mind, “At your marks, set, go!”