Each morning of this week, Daniel Fortin, from the writing of 

Les Échos

, takes stock of a current economic issue.

Today, he returns to the very optimistic forecasts of some economists for the post-Covid-19 crisis.

This is their biggest drop in 12 years: consumer loans fell 11.5% last year in France.

It is one more indicator of the depth of the economic crisis that is hitting us.

Yet today there are economists who believe in a rosy scenario.

"Yes, they're even talking about an upcoming return of the Roaring Twenties, these economists! You know, named after the period following World War I. France had come out of it with a shattered economy and a gigantic public debt. Yet, production jumped 70% in the decade that followed, and our economists are making the same bet: the 2020s could be, against all expectations, years of great prosperity.

What are they relying on to make these rather counterintuitive predictions today?

First element: this is what happened at the end of the first confinement.

Remember, from the first weeks of May, we witnessed a real rebound in consumption to such an extent that in the second quarter activity had fallen by only 3% in France while INSEE or the Bank from France expected much more.

The same could well happen next summer, and experts expect a real release from the urge to use.

But that will not be enough to ensure prosperity over several years.

What makes these economists optimistic is that to this rebound would be added the fruit of an accelerated transformation of the economy thanks to this crisis.

The digital revolution, for example, has seen a real boost.

We see it with teleworking or with the purchasing platforms formed by small traders.

The biological revolution too: never had so many vaccines been produced so quickly thanks to RNA.

And then, of course, the energy transition finally launched with tens of billions of investments on the table.

Projects are flourishing and it is all this that could fuel future growth.

Isn't that a little optimistic?

We must remain cautious.

We do not know at all how companies will come out of this crisis.

We do not know if they will be able to repay the 130 billion euros in loans that have been granted to them.

We do not know if there will be massive social plans.

But we also did not know before the Covid that users of Zoom videoconferencing would be multiplied by 20 in France.

Everything went very quickly in this crisis and the end is not yet written. "