Maybe they can use the S&P defence of only being "advisory"

keep to the Fen Causeway

which is quite likely, I think that might be a sufficient defense.

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}

Jake's rule of stock market confidence: If the price of a stock dropped simply because somebody claimed that it was overvalued, then he was probably right.

Corollary: The rule generalises trivially to entire stock markets, as well as commodities, currencies and most other sorts of financial markets.

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.

NYT: Source Sought for False Story on French Bank

Misunderstandings between the French and visiting British vacationers are a traditional feature of summers in France. But did a British malentendu over another French summer staple -- a fictional series of articles in Le Monde -- contribute to a mysterious sell-off in French bank stocks last week?

...

The series, "End of the Line for the Euro," looked at how a collapse of the single currency might play out, against the backdrop of French presidential elections next year. While the 12-part story was clearly labeled as fiction, it named real banks, like Société Générale, whose shares plunged 15 percent last Wednesday, prompting the bank to deny speculation that it was in financial trouble.

...

"The rumor of a collapse of SocGen could have come from a misreading of the summer series in Le Monde by The Daily Mail," she wrote on the blogging site Twitter, referring to the weekday sister publication of The Mail on Sunday.

Economics is politics by other means