It was expected but Bruno Le Maire confirmed it. The rate of booklet A will be revalued. On August 1 it will go from 1 to 2%.
All investments whose calculation depends on the evolution of the passbook will also see their rate increased. The sustainable development brochure modeled on brochure A also goes to 2%. The home savings account will go from 0.75% to 1.25%. The most interesting is the popular savings account whose rate will increase from 2.2 to 4.6%. An interesting investment but accessible only in conditions of resources. Your income must not exceed 1,692 euros per month for a share to benefit from it.
Favorite collocation of the French
Liquid and tax-free, livret A remains the “preferred” investment of the French with nearly 56 million accounts open for an average outstanding balance of 5,500 euros.
However, despite the rate hike, it will once again be a very infallible bulwark against inflation this year. The INSEE measured the evolution of prices at 5.8% last June for one year and forecasts inflation of between 5 and 6% for all of 2022.
In other words, even with a 2% rate of return, Booklet A causes its owner to lose about 4% of virtual purchasing power.
If you have 1,000 euros in your savings account, after a year you will have 1,020 euros. But with inflation your 1020 euros will have less value than your initial 1000 euros. At the current inflation rate of 5.8%, your capital erodes by 58 euros in a year, which is more than 20 euros. The real return is therefore negative at 38 euros.
63 years of loss with booklet A
Compared to a checking account (which is unpaid), livret A is only used to slightly mitigate monetary erosion.
This has been the case very often since the creation of this investment in 1818. The MoneyVox site has thus measured the real return on Livret A since 1900. For 121 years, the return has been negative for 63 years, that is, more than Half of the time. This has been the case since 2017 with a negative return of 0.55%.
Longer and especially more intense periods of negative returns. Since 1900, when the yield has been negative, it has averaged 11.28%. When positive, the actual return is only 2.85%. So, over a very long period, your virtual purchasing power is very likely to decrease if you let your money hibernate in a booklet A.
If the negative performance of the Livret A reaches a level this year that we have not seen since the 1970s, it will still be far from the records for this investment. The worst year was 1948. In this period of post-war shortages and food shortages, inflation was galloping. The peak was reached in 1948 with an inflation level of 58%. That year, the interest rate on livret A was 2.5%, that is, a real yield of -56%.
Source: BFM TV
