Today France confirmed that the ratings agency Standard and Poor’s has downgraded its rating from AAA to AA+, while Germany and the Netherlands have reportedly escaped downgrades. It is rumored that a total of up to eleven countries face downgrade.

Rumors earlier today prompted a fall in world stock markets with the FTSE 100 down 0.5% and the Dow Jones down 0.8%. This fall in the markets is a clear indication of the severity of the eurocrisis, and how little confidence the markets have in the euro’s integrity and the measures taken by European governments to manage the debt crisis.

The last few months and years have seen desperate attempts by European nations to contain the European debt crisis. While the European Financial Stability Facility, a fund reserved for sovereign debt recovery, is guaranteed by eurozone countries, a downgrade across some of the eurozone nations will make it more difficult for some countries to raise money. Not only will private enterprise struggle, but government will find it harder to collect revenue. At the end of last year, a summit of European leaders failed to unite the continent behind a recovery plan, with the UK using its veto on the proposed treaty.

The euro crisis is getting worse the longer it lingers on. European politicians are not yet ready to admit that the euro, which was always a political rather than economic experiment, has been a failure. The admission of countries like Greece, which had huge levels of government spending, was a mistake for which Europe is now paying a very heavy price.

Unfortunately it is the millions of Europeans that will pay this price for the politically motivated and moronic economic policies of the last few decades, and not the politicians who implemented them. Too many mistakes have been made in the efforts to manage the debt crisis to make recovery manageable, and today’s news is an indication of things to come.