Oops: S&P accidentally lowers France’s credit rating
The French government is demanding an investigation after Standard & Poor’s sent out an e-mail to subscribers which erroneously suggested that the agency had lowered France’s credit rating. It hadn’t: After S.& P. reported the error, France’s finance minister, François Baroin, quickly demanded an investigation into “the causes and eventual consequences of the error.” Within ...
The French government is demanding an investigation after Standard & Poor's sent out an e-mail to subscribers which erroneously suggested that the agency had lowered France's credit rating. It hadn't:
The French government is demanding an investigation after Standard & Poor’s sent out an e-mail to subscribers which erroneously suggested that the agency had lowered France’s credit rating. It hadn’t:
After S.& P. reported the error, France’s finance minister, François Baroin, quickly demanded an investigation into “the causes and eventual consequences of the error.” Within a half-hour, the French stock market watchdog said it would open one. It also notified the European financial market authority, which oversees “the professional obligations of the ratings agencies.”
In a statement, S.& P. attributed the message to “a technical error” and affirmed that the rating was unchanged. But the yield for France’s 10-year benchmark bond jumped more than a quarter-point, to 3.48 percent, and the spread between French and German bonds of that duration reached 170 basis points, a euro-era record, Bloomberg News reported.
The erroneous S.& P. message went out shortly before 4 p.m. Paris time, and the correction was issued almost two hours later, after most European markets had closed.
This is S&P’s second doozy of the year, after a $2.1 trillion error in the calculations leading to the U.S. downgrade in August. And, you know, that whole subprime mortgage thing.
Joshua Keating was an associate editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @joshuakeating
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