Philippe Simonnot
French economist

Philippe Simonnot (10 July 1941 – 17 November 2022) was a French economist and journalist.
Simonnot earned a doctorate in economic sciences from the University of Aix-Marseille and was the author of numerous books on economics. He occasionally published chronicles in the press, such as in Le Figaro and Le Monde.
Simonnot died on 17 November 2022, at the age of 81.
Journalist
Simonnot was an economic journalist specializing on the oil market for Le Monde, where he published an article on the Elf Aquitaine in 1976. The article led him to be fired, about which he published a book on the functions of the newspaper's director Jacques Fauvet and, more broadly, the entire profession of journalism, titled Le Monde et le pouvoir.
In 1988, while working as an economic journalist for the weekly news magazine Politis, he developed a theory in which Homo sportivus was replaced by Homo economicus.
Economist
Simonnot closely researched monetary issues. Faced with the crises of the end of the Bretton Woods system and the introduction of floating exchange rates, he advocated for the return to a precious metal backing of the US dollar or the euro. He strongly criticized government and favored the physiocrats.
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This entry incorporates text from “Philippe Simonnot” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.