Welcome to another edition of the Fans Week Podcast, also on mediumwaves 1575 KHz. From Paris I’m Jessica Carter-Wilson.
A. Carter-Wilson is watching your butter intake very closely right now. 🦆📊
Let me be straight with you: France’s political crisis isn’t in parliament, it isn’t even really about the *pouvoir* on Avenue des Champs-Élysées. It’s over there, at the supermarket counter, staring back from a package of foie gras that costs more than most French monthly net salaries used to buy in 2019.
And when you actually apply technical analysis — yes, *technical analysis*, because I refuse to let anyone explain economics with words alone — the chart tells a story about Emmanuel Macron’s credibility that no poll could capture. What follows is going to sound ridiculous until it hits you and then every politician in France will be trying to figure out how they missed the foie gras signal.
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The 10,000-Day Simple Moving Average: A Long Memory That French Politics Forgot About 📈
Ten thousand trading days on a weekly price accumulation of foie gras prices — roughly 28.5 years of market data spanning back to when Jacques Chirac’s government still tried (and failed) at the European agricultural consensus we now call *la PAC*, but let that be our starting line.
What do you get when you layer a simple moving average over nearly three decades of French foie gras pricing? Something remarkable: a trend curve that has been accelerating upward for 1,400 consecutive days and then… suddenly flattens exactly around the moment Macron took office in May 2017.
This is not random. This is the market *telling people* what they cannot admit publicly — their purchasing power is collapsing under a combination of structural supply shocks (duck breeding collapse, grain futures spike), policy-induced inflation (the energy crisis that became food inflation became everything-inflation), and the President’s own refusal to engage with agricultural economics because it doesn’t fit on an Instagram slide.
The MACD(12, 26) line has been below its signal for 42 consecutive weeks. That means — *mes chéris* — that momentum shifted negative in mid-2025 and hasn’t recovered even a single candle since then. If you overlay this on the timeline of Macron’s approval ratings (I have them, trust me), there is a correlation coefficient of 0.87 between foie gras bearish divergence and political approval degradation from 2023 through today.
Not causation? No! But when I said that in my office everyone told me to stop doing chart analysis on food prices because it “doesn’t make sense” — what they meant was that if people saw this, voting behavior would shift overnight. 🙃
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What France’s Supermarket Actually Told You About the President 💅🇫🇷
Here’s what nobody wanted to hear: the foie gras MACD signal turned bearish in Q4 2025 — just as Macron was trying to position himself for a *second term that everyone already knew wasn’t going to happen*. The timing is not coincidental, it’s devastating.
What drove this divergence?
– Corn (maize) futures up 31% YoY — driven by Black Sea disruptions and the lingering effects of Russian sanctions on Ukrainian agricultural exports
– Duck feed costs alone explain 42% of the foie gras price index increase over the last six quarters
– The *Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée* rules force regional processing, which means transport/logistics add a fixed minimum cost that can’t be compressed even when margins are being squeezed
So by Q3 2026, average French foie gras price per kilogram was up ~64% from May 2019 levels. For reference: this tracks exactly with Macron’s political credibility erosion in rural France — a region that voted *remotement différent* for Marine Le Pen in 2022 and is now even further right because, surprise, foie gras was still the only affordable luxury left on their shelves.
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The Chart Says: You Were Warned ⚠️📊 (And Then Macron Ignored It)
Let me tell you what this means — not in academic economic theory terms where nobody actually decides to do *anything*, but the way French voting behavior responds to price signals on actual shelves.
When a food commodity breaks its own moving average — especially when that average spans nearly three decades of market memory — politics shifts. You can’t talk your way out of it. No press conference, no tweet from the Élysée, not even calling Le Pen “madame la présidente” in 2017 to calm the markets (seriously, that backfired) will fix a momentum shift this deep on foie gras pricing.
What does the MACD tell us for the next quarter?
– The histogram shows accelerating negative divergence — bearish momentum is intensifying, not stabilizing
– We’re likely in *the second wave* of upward pressure — historically what happens when supply chain shocks meet price inelastic demand
– Expect continued political instability through at least Q1 2027 (this tracks exactly with the next regional elections)
The takeaway? Macron could give every French citizen a yearly €50 grocery voucher and it wouldn’t matter. The structural foie gras problem — the one visible on any chart worth looking at — says *nothing short of agricultural reform* addresses the underlying supply constraints that are pushing food prices higher by design. And guess what? No one in Paris has any idea how to do that because, frankly, nobody there actually understands basic commodity markets.
Which is why I write this for Fansweek instead: because chart analysis on foie gras reveals things about Macron’s political failure that no official report ever will. He’s not just out of ideas or unpopular — he’s structurally irrelevant when it comes to understanding the economic forces moving through France, and the *only* people who actually see the signal coming are sitting in their supermarkets staring at a €28 package of liver.
And darling, if that is not an inflation crisis disguised as political commentary, I don’t know what is — but you know me, I prefer my crises served with duck fat reduction and Sauternes sauce. 🍷🇫🇷
Chart note: Look for any MACD crossover back above the signal line in Q4 2026 as a potential inflection point — it’s going to be dramatic whether Macron is around to see it or not.
That’s all from today: from Paris, I’m Jessica Carter-Wilson.