Performing the 'Good' Management for Public Debt Issuing. The Politics of State Financialisation

In this paper, I propose to analyze the several ways of managing public debt issuing existing in different countries. Indeed, the government debt can be managed either by the traditional service Ministry of Finance (USA, Japan, Italy) or the central bank (Denmark, Canada), by an office of debt management under the Ministry of Finance (New Zealand, Australia, France); or a separate office management debt (Ireland, Portugal, UK, Sweden). I will show how politics of innovation, on public debt management organizations, raise political and technical issues, dealing with reconfiguration of global capitalism and, in particular, the transformation of the relationships between banks, States, and creditors. In a first part, I will develop the case of the creation, in the late 1990s, of the Agence France Trésor (AFT), in charge at the French Ministry of Finance, for issuing, public debt on financial markets. This invention is characteristic of the application, in France, of the format "agency" in the traditional Regalian prerogative of financing State deficits. AFT appears as a typical example of the implementation organization called "independent" in public policy sectors exposed to financial market constraints. In a second part, I will analyze the way incentives to debt management reforms that encourage separation of different functions for State managing are made through policy recommendations by international organizations such as the IMF and the OECD, but also by sovereign rating analysis, comments and warnings. Such organizations are performing references, benchmarks and « model » for organizing State. The power of “agency” and the model of separate services and functions deals with creditors and capital markets expectations to build or “stage” the independence of sovereign debt from politics, reflecting the political will of non-intervention (and debt repayment) by government authorities in professional debt market business.