France's 10-year borrowing cost briefly tops 5% for the first time since 2002 as protests spread

France's debt problem has become the main concern for European markets, according to the Reuters Morning Bid column. On Wednesday the 10-year French government bond yield briefly went above 5% for the first time since 2002, CNBC reported, before settling near 4.98%. The gap over German Bunds widened by 5.5 basis points to about 152.5 basis points. In early October it reached 158.67, its widest since November 2011, according to market reporting compiled by Fortune. The minority government still has no budget through a divided parliament, and protest groups have called a new day of demonstrations for Saturday.

The unrest has become a dispute between governments. Speaking in Qatar, Macron said foreign leaders had made false claims about France's troubles for their own political ends, and that Trump "does not like France," The New York Times reported. BBC News Hindi reported Trump's side of the exchange. He told American voters to "just look at France," blamed migrants for the violence, and said Paris would soon become a Muslim city. Macron rejected the description of rioters as "Islamist and migrant mobs."

Some commentators on the American right offer a different diagnosis. In an essay republished by ZeroHedge, the writer Brandon Smith describes France as a case study in a "pillager class" that lives on transfers taken from a "producer class." That is a polemical framing, not reporting. It does match the bond market's question: can a state that spends more than half of national output close its deficit without a political breakdown?

Macron is also acting on his own abroad. He flew from Doha to Riyadh and secured additional Saudi diesel for France "for as many months as necessary." It was a bilateral energy deal, made at a time when Washington and Paris are trading insults.