After six months keeping the world guessing about whether he had a vision for fixing France's sickly economy, President Francois Hollande has unveiled a battle plan "à la française" to ease companies' labour costs and trim public spending. But the softly-softly pace of adjustment may be too slow to satisfy financial markets after Moody's on Monday became the second credit ratings agency to strip Paris of its AAA rating, citing both a loss of competitiveness and low growth, Reuters reported in an analysis.

France suffered the second downgrade of its sovereign debt rating this year when Moody’s, the US rating agency, removed its triple A ranking on Monday night, the Financial Times reported. It followed a similar move in January by Standard & Poor’s and underscored concerns that the country’s high level of public debt, which has risen above 90 per cent of gross national product, put it in danger of becoming another victim of the eurozone debt crisis. The move will pose a serious test for François Hollande’s socialist administration, in office for only six months.

France and Belgium Thursday agreed to inject a further €5.5 billion ($7 billion) into Dexia SA, putting one of the first European banking casualties of the 2008 financial crisis almost entirely in state hands and adding to the burden of cutting government debt and deficits amid the euro-zone recession, The Wall Street Journal reported. France agreed in the wee hours of the European morning to provide €2.59 billion and Belgium €2.92 billion in exchange for preference shares.

Netoil Inc., a Dubai-based company, has submitted a revised offer for insolvent Petroplus Holdings AG’s Petit-Couronne refinery in Normandy, France, teaming up with BP Plc., Bloomberg Businessweek reported. “We didn’t have a supplier before, now, we have a letter of intent from BP to supply 120,000 barrels of crude a day to the refinery for a three-year period,” Roger Tamraz, Netoil’s chairman, said today in a telephone interview from Paris.

France's government has promised €20 billion ($25 billion) in tax credits to businesses as part of a "competitiveness pact" that it hopes will spark innovation and lower unemployment - but falls short of calls in a recent report for a "shock" to the economy, the Associated Press reported. The announcement of the plan Tuesday came a day after a government-commissioned report — by Louis Gallois, former head of Airbus parent EADS — said the country's ailing economy needed a big kick to stay globally competitive.

The European Union summit that ended Friday suggested Germany and France, always awkward partners in managing the three-year-old euro crisis, are increasingly at odds over how to resolve it, The Wall Street Journal reported. The summit produced a tortuous compromise between the currency bloc's two biggest nations over the creation of a new euro-zone banking supervisor, but it also brought simmering disagreements between Berlin and Paris into the open.

A Spanish court has accepted a filing for bankruptcy from two investment firms that own 31 percent of French property company Gecina, Reuters reported. Alteco and MAG Import filed for bankruptcy on Oct. 3 after a bank refused to refinance a 1.6 billion euro ($2 billion) loan, leaving nearly a dozen lenders exposed. Alteco and MAG Import met conditions for voluntary bankruptcy, two Spanish mercantile courts said in documents released on Tuesday. French bank Natixis has the most exposure to the loan, at 266 million euros.

French engineering group Geci International's Sky Aircraft unit was placed under creditor protection on Thursday, giving it six months to find partners to save the project, Reuters reported. Geci said following the ruling by the commercial court at Briey in eastern France it would use the time to pursue all the options it was exploring to safeguard the future of the Skylander light aircraft. "Management and the company are mobilised to seek financing solutions and to assure a future for the Skylander programme as well as all its staff," Geci said in a statement.

Two Spanish investment firms that own 31 percent of French property company Gecina have filed one of the biggest bankruptcy actions in Spanish history after a bank refused to refinance a 1.6 billion euro ($2.1 billion) loan, Reuters reported. The potential bankruptcy is the latest chapter in Spain's debt saga since its 2008 real estate crash, which forced banks to write billions of euros off property investments.

Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Paris on Sunday to protest against the spread of economic "austerity" in France and Europe, The Guardian reported. Chanting "resistance, resistance", the crowds had been rallied by around 60 organisations, including the leftwing Front de Gauche and the French Communist party, which oppose the European budget treaty. "Today is the day the French people launch a movement against the politics of austerity," said the Front de Gauche president, Jean-Luc Mélenchon.