Oops! S&P downgrades France's AAA by mistake

Ratings agency Standard & Poor's (S&P) was last night at the centre of a storm after it accidentally downgraded France's AAA rating.

An email sent out by mistake in the afternoon claimed France had lost its AAA status, before S&P was forced to issue a statement revealing its error. The statement said: "As a result of a technical error, a message was automatically disseminated today to some subscribers of S&P's Global Credit Portal suggesting that France's credit rating had been changed. "This is not the case: the ratings of Republic of France remain triple A with a stable outlook and this incident is not related to any ratings surveillance activity. We are investigating the cause of the error." However, French a...