The French debt under Sarkozy, Hollande and Macron: story of fifteen years of uncontrolled slippage
STORY - Since losing its “triple A” rating in January 2012, France has never straightened out its public accounts. It has sunk in stages and today finds itself plunged into an unprecedented financial crisis.
It’s a story that started on Friday the 13th. Normally, it’s a story to scare you. A story of a country haunted by a specter, that of the financial crisis, which we never see and then which finally emerges.
After fifteen years. A Friday the 13th, therefore, in January 2012. At 10:38 p.m., France lost its “triple A”.
Standard & Poor’s lowers by one notch the rating assigned to the credit quality of French sovereign debt. The decision is technical, investors had anticipated it. They know that rating agencies like S&P have a lot to be forgiven for looking the other way when finance was shoveling corrupt subprime loans to the whole world.
They are reviewing their scales, triple A is no longer a given. S&P also downgraded the United States in August 2011. The euro zone's free rider The Friday the 13th announcement by S&P, on the other hand, is a political bombshell.
It falls less than a hundred days before the presidential election. Nicolas Sarkozy, candidate for re-election, has made his ability to preserve France's triple A status a marker of his action. He made it a campaign item.
Bad bet. “It is not France that has been degraded. It’s a policy, it’s a strategy, it’s a team, it’s a government, it’s a president,” reacts his rival François Hollande, who assures that he “will not (put) himself in the hands of the rating agencies.”
Marine Le Pen sees it as “the first stage of the spiral of the breakup of the euro zone” and therefore the “validation of the analysis (that she has been doing) for two years”.
Machine-translated from French
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- Le Figaro23 Oct, 23:02
| Publisher Le Figaro (established tier) | +76 |
| Detailed summary | +2 |
| Total | 78 |
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