France’s Le Maire Urges Collective G-20 Action on Supply Squeeze

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The world’s leading economies must jointly tackle supply-chain bottlenecks that are spurring inflation and threatens to derail economic growth, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said.

“We are facing the negative consequences of the rapid economic recovery: bottlenecks, shortages on the labor market, on semiconductors, on raw materials -- it might affect the level of growth over the next months and over the next year,” Le Maire said in a Bloomberg TV interview. 

We “need all the G-20 countries to address the issue and to find very concrete solutions,” he said.

The Group of 20 finance ministers are meeting on Friday in Rome ahead of a leaders’ summit. 

The fraying of supply chains across industries and the surge in energy prices helped inflation in the euro area exceed 4% in October only for the second time ever, according to data released Friday.

Le Maire said Europe should reduce its reliance on global supplies to avoid similar crises in the future.

“We want Europe to be more independent, to invest in new factories so we can have our own semiconductors, not being too much dependent on Asia, on South Korea, on other nations” he said. 

France and other European countries should also invest more in nuclear and renewable energy sources, he said. 

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