S&P Downgrades France and 8 Other Eurozone Sovereigns

Standard and Poor’s rating agency has lowered the credit ratings of 9 eurozone members, including formerly AAA-rated France and Austria. The move is significant, affecting as it does the future of the eurozone’s bail-out fund, the French presidential election, the roll-over of existing European sovereign debt, and more. However, the downgrade is not really a catastrophe for the nations downgraded nor for the European economy’s prospects. Our purpose here is to understand what the downgrade is, what it means and what it may not mean.

First off, what is a sovereign credit rating and what does a downgrade mean? There are numerous entities in finance that offer their well-informed (or otherwise) opinions about a variety of investment instruments. What we are concerned with here are the three main credit rating agencies: S&P, Fitch and my former employer Moody’s. What they do is issue a rating, that is an alphanumeric symbol, that encapsulates the agency’s detailed analysis of a debtor’s ability and willingness to repay a debt. In that sense, their ratings aren’t a whole lot different from the FICO score you have that is supposed to tell lenders about your creditworthiness.

While the methodologies vary a bit from one agency to another, the ratings scales of each are comparable by and large. For example, AAA is the best rating possible (Aaa at Moody’s). Junk status is about 10 notches below that at BB+ (Ba1 Moody’s) , and default is another 10 or so notches down. Because these agencies have been in the business of issuing ratings for decades (Moody’s was founded in 1900), it is possible to tie actual default experiences to the ratings. S&P’s can be found here.

On Friday, France and Austria fell one notch from AAA to AA+, Italy fell a couple of notches from A to BBB+, Spain went down one from AA- to A, Cyprus dropped two notches to BB+, Portugal’s two notch fall leaves it at BB (junk status, and it also has a negative outlook), Malta went down one notch to A- from A, Slovakia fell a notch to A from A+, and Slovenia is one notch lower at A+ from AA-. The other members of the eurozone retain their ratings. That means Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Finland kept their AAA. For the record, the other members states and their S&P ratings are: Belgium (AA), Estonia (AA-), Greece (CC) and Ireland (BBB).

What is extremely important to remember is that the downgrades were only to the ratings issued by S&P. Moody’s and Fitch did nothing. In their eyes, France and Austria (and the USA for that matter) are still AAA. Split ratings, when the agencies don’t agree exactly, are rather common. And in every regulation where ratings agencies are mentioned, two different agencies’ opinions matter, not three. So, there is a real question as to whether Austria and France are still AAA or not. The market, of course, is not focused on the dog that didn’t bark – it’s paying attention to S&P despite it having the minority opinion.

Be that as it may, the S&P downgrades for France and Austria are economically inconvenient but not really all that important for investors. Yes, both will have to pay a bit more in interest to fund their debts. However, a study by JPMorgan Chase looking at the nine sovereign borrowers that lost their AAA ratings between 1998 and the US downgrade in August shows an increase of 2 basis points (or 0.02%) in the following week. Is it a make or break situation if your mortgage is 4.12% or 4.14%? France and Austria will face no funding problems as a result of the downgrade. And indeed, the US saw its borrowing costs actually decline immediately after S&P downgraded it a few months ago.

The reason for this minimal change lies in the default record of AA+ issuers. According to the chart cited above, issuers rated AAA will default 0.00% of the time in the next 12 months. An issuer with a rating of AA+ has the same default rate over 12 months. Over a 5-year period, the default rate for AAA issuers is 0.10%; for an AA+ debtor, it’s 0.15%. In other words, if you lend to France or Austria by buying a 3-year bond, you still have a 99+% chance of getting paid back in full with interest on time.

Where the downgrades do become problematic is in the political sphere. In three months’ time, the French will go to the polls to elect a president. France lost its AAA rating on Nicholas Sarkozy’s watch, and whether justly or not, he will take some blame for it – the leftish newspaper Liberation ran a headline calling him S_RKOZY, having lost an “A” of his own. He currently trails socialist candidate Francois Hollande by 10% in the polls. With 53% of the electorate believing that the loss of the AAA rating is a serious matter, the downgrade only makes his re-election more difficult.

In the end, though, the ratings come back to the issue that undermined them in the first place – the euro. The bail-out fund that has kept Greece, Ireland and Portugal afloat so far, the European Financial Stability Facility, was rated AAA because of its backing from AAA-rated sovereigns. However, 16 January 2012, S&P dropped that rating to AA+ because of the French and Austrian downgrades. S&P said that the EFSF could get its AAA back if it could obtain more guarantees (from whom I wonder?) or if it raised less money that would be better protected by the existing guarantees. A smaller bail-out fund, however, is less likely to succeed at stabilizing the eurozone. At the same time, a fund rated less than AAA will have to pay more for its funds, and that will make the bail-out fund less effective as well.

So what does it all mean? Objectively, the difference between AAA and AA+ is very small, and it should not have much impact. Markets, however, are never objective. They are fueled by greed and fear. S&P’s downgrade of these nations has made the eurozone’s problems harder to solve.