France August household consumption falls 0.5% month-on-month, missing flat forecast

The swing from a July gain to an August contraction in French household spending matters less as a single data point than as a signal about the durability of domestic demand in the euro area's second-largest economy. With the print landing below a forecast that already assumed no growth, the miss suggests the prior month's increase was not the start of a sustained recovery. Whether this softness feeds through into broader euro-area activity data, and how it shapes the policy debate, is the open question worth tracking.