Could France become the next peripheral?

FRANCE

"If it walks and talks like a peripheral…"

Following the downgrade by S&P earlier in the year, Moody’s has now downgraded French sovereign debt from AAA to AA1. For some time, there has been a general feeling France is part of the soft core which finds itself between the ‘core hawks’ (Germany, The Netherlands, Finland), and the peripherals. The main driver of this perception is the stance taken by French president François Hollande in the debates about building European institutions that work towards fiscal and banking union. France clearly sides with the periphery in believing burden sharing should come first but this is n...