LoL We don't need no stinking AAA...
Sarkozy plays down value of triple A status
Nicolas Sarkozy, French president, on Monday played down the importance of the potential loss of France’s cherished top credit rating, in an about-turn which raised speculation that a downgrade could be close.
A lowering of the triple A sovereign rating – which allows France to fund its public spending cheaply – “would be one more difficulty but not insurmountable”, Mr Sarkozy said in an interview with Le Monde newspaper. “We would face such a situation coolly and calmly.”
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IN EUROPE
François Baroin, finance minister, who said just weeks ago that France would “do everything to avoid a downgrade”, told BFM television on Monday morning that the pronouncements of rating agencies were “one among many” judgments on the economy.
Marc Fiorentino, chairman of the Euroland Finance brokerage, said: “The government has made the French people aware of the significance of the triple A – that it’s our national treasure and that losing it would be the end of the world. Now they are having to shift 180 degrees.”
Mr Sarkozy’s economic management is one of the main battlegrounds in the forthcoming French presidential election. However, he is under less pressure over the country’s potential loss of its triple A status since Standard & Poor’s put 14 other eurozone countries, including Germany, on negative watch alongside France last week.
Moody’s rating agency also warned on Mondaythat it might downgrade its triple A rating for some European countries. The move by Moody’s suggested that a deal on greater fiscal discipline brokered by Angela Merkel, German chancellor, and Mr Sarkozy in Brussels on Friday had not been enough to calm investor concerns about the region’s debt crisis.
However, Mr Sarkozy praised the compact as “a decisive step towards European integration” which created the conditions for an exit from the crisis.
He flaunted the intergovernmental nature of the deal, which became a fait accompli after the UK vetoed changing the European Union treaty, Germany’s favoured option, which would have given legal teeth to the deal through the EU’s institutions.
Mr Sarkozy championed his own vision, insisting that the intergovernmental deal was more democratic and would not transfer any powers to Brussels.
“The fact that the governance reverts to heads of state and governments marks an incontestable democratic process compared with the previous situation in which everything revolved around the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the stability pact,” he said.
Asked if the agreement had left Britain outside Europe, Mr Sarkozy said: “There are clearly two Europes – one which wants more solidarity and regulation between its members. The other, which is solely attached to a single market.”
However, Jean-Pierre Jouyet, head of the Autorité des Marchés Financiers, the stock market regulator, regretted Britain’s decision, saying David Cameron, British prime minister, had fallen victim to financial lobbyists.
“It used to be said that the French right was the world’s stupidest,” he told France Inter radio. “The English right has shown it is capable of being the world’s stupidest, in serving purely financial interests and not the national interest. That’s regrettable because we need our British friends in Europe.”
OH so it's all the Brits fault.....LoL
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