THE DEAD-ENDS OF ECONOMIC-POLICY AT THE E RA OF FINANCIAL-MARKETS

Because economics is unable to provide certain statements, agents' act ion must rely on ''home-made'' substitution knowledge. This one is in fact a collective product, named hereafter a referential. The referent ial is a corpus of representations which privides a synoptic view of t he working of the economy and helps agents to make themselves an idea of what is ''good'' or ''bad'' for them. Mixing pieces of academic the ory more or less ideological statements and various beliefs, the refer ential is built in the interplay of multiple institutional talks. The referential allows to settle an economic policy norm, whereas multiple such norms were a priori possible. The present paper tries to show ho w such an economic policy norm is self-stabilizing because of self-ful filling prophecies effects, but how nevertheless it can be driven to c risis as soon as doubts or critics on its relevance reappear. It is su ggested that since the beginning of the 90's, the French economic poli cy is faced with a return of multiple equilibria of norm: in short the so-called ''desinflation competitive'' vs the ''other policy''. Becau se of the competition between these two norms, the decisions of econom ic policy may be quite indeterminate. It is proposed that not all the societies are able, as the German is, to build the hermeneutic and sem iotic devices which permit to contain indeterminacy on a long term hor izon.