French Downgrade Focuses on Failure to Compete MADRID - The French can always blame their latest bit of financial bad news on the Curse of The Economist. An overnight announcement that France had lost its prized triple-A debt rating came after The Economist, the prestigious Britain-based weekly, ran a cover story describing the country as a time bomb at the heart of Europe. French sensibilities, including those of the government, were outraged by a report that described France as potentially the biggest danger to the European single currency. It also described President François Hollande as half-hearted about introducing much-needed reforms in view of the gravity of France's economic problems. The magazine ominously reminded the French that the last time it targeted a European country for its failure to reform - Italy in mid-2011 - the government of Silvio Berlusconi was out by the end of the year. In the latest official response to The Economist's report, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, the government spokesperson, wrote on Monday that France was "credible" and was being twice as ambitious as the euro zone average in terms of cutting its deficit. And more efforts would be made on cutting expenditure to improve France's competitiveness, she wrote in an op-ed rebuttal. Hey presto! The very same day, Moody's Investors Service, one of the big three ratings agencies, downgraded France's sovereign debt to reflect in part "its gradual, sustained loss of competitiveness and the long-standing rigidities of its labor, goods and service markets." Those were factors that figured in The Economist's assessment, dismissed by some in France as the latest in a line of "French-bashing" covers from the pro-free market weekly. Agnès Poirier, a French journalist writing in The Guardian, said the magazine refused to understand French "exceptionalism" and the central role of the state, and therefore saw a French collapse as inevitable. "The irony, of course, is that the Economist has to admit that France's exception is what makes it attractive in the first place," she wrote. The response was not all negative. Gaspard Koenig, a French politician presently working in London, thanked The Economist for doing the job of the French media. "'Time bomb' is a rational conclusion based on the facts," he wrote at Atlantico in an article that ridiculed the French press for its overreaction to The Economist report. Standard & Poor's downgraded France's credit rating in January, along with Italy and seven other European countries. And Europe's debt as a whole has undergone waves of downgrading, which has set off a backlash against the ratings agencies. Nowhere have the countercharges been tougher than in France, where some allege an Anglo-Saxon conspiracy orchestrated on Wall Street and in The City to damage France - by the same ratings agencies that failed to warn against the securitization of subprime mortgages and over-leveraged banks that set off the global economic crisis. The left-leaning New Statesman, another British weekly, acknowledged the new Moody's downgrade of France was bad news for Mr. Hollande. However, it added, "it is worth remembering the standard disclaimers about credit rating agencies: they aren't very good at rating credit, know less than any competent macroeconomist about sovereign debt, and basically just don't know what they're talking about. So France needn't be too scared just yet.