Capitalization table for future losses

The table published by the Gazette du Palais in 2022 uses a zero discount rate. At zero, capitalizing third-party care of 30,000 euros a year for a twenty-year-old claimant means a multiplier above sixty, close to two million euros. At 2%, the same capital would fall below 1.2 million. A capitalization table gives the price of one euro of annuity, the multiplier that turns an annual loss into a lump sum. It rests on two inputs only. The mortality table says how many years the annuity would run; the discount rate says what a euro paid in twenty years is worth today. The whole negotiation turns on the rate. Setting it is a policy choice dressed up as arithmetic, since two points move a young claimant's award by hundreds of thousands of euros without a line of the medical report changing. France has no single official table. Several coexist, and each side argues for its own. A lump sum closes the file and releases the reserve, where an annuity keeps it open for decades.