After several weeks of speculation – and one "erroneous" press release in
November the first "official" word of Standard & Poor's downgrading
France's AAA rating came Friday afternoon. But it came not from S&P but from
French Finance Minister Francois Baroin , who spoke on French TV. He said the
rating would be dropped by one notch, to AA+. Speculation was high all day on
Friday that S&P would finally move to lower the ratings of several eurozone
countries after various officials made off-the-record comments about the looming
downgrades. An EU official told Bloomberg that Italy's rating was getting cut
by two notches, from A to BBB+. Germany was reported to be keeping its pristine
AAA rating. As of mid-afternoon in New York, S&P had not yet made any official
announcements. It typically does so after the New York markets close. The major
U.S. indexes didn't react dramatically as the news of the downgrades grew more
certain on Friday afternoon. After being down over 100 points earlier, partly on
the poor earnings report by JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM ), with less than an hour
to go on NYSE trading, the Dow Jones Industrials were down around 80 points.
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