S&P Claims France “AAA” Rating Action Is Not Real (EWQ)

OK, the ratings agency games have always been interesting and that is hard to refute.  Today’s news just takes the cake entirely.  S&P has “clarified and erroneous message” when it comes to the “AAA” ratings of the Republic of France.

The ratings agency has said a technical error allowed a message to be automatically disseminated today to some S&P subscribers of the Global Credit Portal which had suggested that France’s “AAA” credit rating had been changed.

S&P says that this is not the case and it went on to note that France remains at ‘AAA/A-1+’ AND that it has a stable outlook.  S&P also went on to say that this incident is “not related to any ratings surveillance activity” and that it is investigating the cause of the error.

So, how are we supposed to take or interpret this?  Is S&P reconsidering its Euroland “AAA” ratings in some communications?  Was there a hack?  Or, was it truly just an error.  We outlined earlier in the year when the issue of the U.S. “AAA” rating was under fire that France and other European nations could easily find the “AAA” ratings taken away.

iShares MSCI France Index (NYSE: EWQ) is still up 2% at $20.20 but that is down under its opening price of $20.35.  Maybe the French will find out the same thing that America found out: maybe the “AAA” rating is not as critical as many investors worried about.

There is only one way to describe today’s news… Weird.  Really weird.

JON C. OGG