Don't sweat the small stuff, sweetheart

BNP Paribas gets burned by the US subprime market and French journalists howl like stuck pigs. What!?! A French national champion has been sucker punched?!? Must be an American plot. As happened immediately after the Enron scandal, we'll be seeing French editorials of the furrowed brow sort about how American-led capitalism has gone awry and that something must be done to change all this. Expect to see those editorials within the next 48 hours. Nothing gets worthless Europeans off of their lazy duffs like a bit of self righteous America bashing.

Minyanville on containment:
"The U.K? Germany? And now Pepe Le Pew is holding his nose too? So much for containment."

Dealbreaker.com on BNP's "Freedom Funds":
To make matters worse, the funds have ridiculous French names like Parvest Dynamic ABS, BNP Paribas ABS Euribor and BNP Paribas ABS Eonia. We're thinking of just calling them "Freedom Funds."

It's good to see that respect for the French is at just around zero chez the Big Money Boyz.

UPDATE: That didn't take long. Le Monde Al-Jazeera on the Seine has an analysis up on how this American-led globalisation thing has gone all wobbly, what with these bouts of financial speculation and other unseemly activities that tend to scare God Secular-government-fearing Zeropeans half to death. It's the usual puff piece with some references to the Tulip bubble and the crash of 1929 thrown in just to let you know that this is France's newspaper of reference so you had better take it seriously.