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 ...

By , a former associate editor at Foreign Policy.

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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