let's get more on that crucial meeting from jim bitterman joining us live from paris. im, first up, let's talk about france losing its aaa crown. that's surely going to have hurt. france already had a tense relationship with the ratings agencies months before. >> reporter: absolutely, nina. they've been talking about this for the last six weeks here at least. this morning, the downgrade has brought the newspaper headline together. everyone says the shock wave talking about the loss of aaa and figaro says the crisis of the euro is reshuffling the cards. one of the decks of cards that's being reshuffled is the presidential race here. we're less than 100 days from the first round of the election and president sarkozy has been dealt a real blow by this. he staked a lot of his reputation on maintaining that aaa. justified a lot of the economic reforms on the basis of the fact that france needed to keep its aaa rating. now that it's lost that, the opposition has a field day, the socialist candidate for president says that it's not that france has been downgraded, it's preside