Is anyone else suspicious about the S&P downgrading the US credit rating (for the first time in modern history)? Their decision is clearly all about politics. They even said that they weren’t downgrading the US government’s debt as much as they were downgrading the US government because they don’t like it.
Is this the banking industry just trying to put additional screws to the Obama administration? Already Republicans are calling for Timothy Geithner to resign and blaming the economy on him (not that I have any love for Geithner, but still).
The Republicans are also blasting Obama for the credit rating downgrade, but if you read the downgrade statement from S&P, they were actually even more critical of the Republicans for refusing to consider revenue increases, saying that they changed their opinion of the government “because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues”.
I guess nowadays everything has become political. Does anyone actually care about, you know, fixing the economy?
11 Comments
The downgrade makes perfect sense. The debt is out of control and it has everything to do with politics because..uh…idk the government controls it?
Who, exactly, are the people that make these decisions coming from Standard & Poor’s?
What’s their take in all this?
Bankers. Even worse, investment bankers.
Bankgsters… I should have known.
Aren’t these the same guys who gave great ratings to the sub-prime investment packages???
Yes, they are. See http://www.businessinsider.com/credit-rating-agency-that-rated-subprime-mbs-investment-grade-downgrades-us-2011-8
“Does anyone actually care about, you know, fixing the economy?”
“Corporate profits from current production increased $48.7 billion, or 2.9 percent at a quarterly rate, in the first quarter [of 2011] after increasing $38.2 billion, or 2.3 percent, in the fourth quarter [of 2010].” – http://www.bea.gov/scb/pdf/2011/07%20July/0711_gdpecon.pdf, page 4
What’s wrong with the economy?
ZJD – what is wrong with the economy is high US unemployment, and the continued tanking of the housing market, both of which hit the middlle class and below. The econoomy is working just fine for the rich and corporations.
And therein lies the problem – with high unemployment the tax base is reduced, and because we gave tax cuts to those that can afford to pay more we are in a hole. The solutions, while not simple, or fairly obvious and if it wasn’t for the Republican “we must defeat Obama at all costs” we would have fixed them already.
The economy in order to be successful must GROW from the bottom up… that means jobs.. people with jobs spend.. money starts flowing up.. This Trickle down your pants economics.. is exactly what happened to our economy.. it trickled down so much .. it is below the gutter.
Public Campaign funding would stop this asinine approach along with a ban on lobbyist…however, all of that would have to be passed by the Repel-ick-ans in office too.. and I doubt any politician would go for it.
In many ways the downgrade makes sense. The reasons that I heard include that the deal should have been bigger (and there were two plans to do bigger deals that the Tea Party would not accept) and because Congress almost could not make it happen. As I understand it, the downgrade has less to do with the size of the debt than the process of managing the budget and the debt.
What is truly crazy is that this probably would not have happened at all if Congress just did what Obama had originally asked for and that had been done every other time (since 1995) the debt ceiling needed to be raised and just raised it cleanly.
A friend posted this to Facebook earlier this weekend. I thought some might find it interesting. I don’t know anything about the blogger, but he/she apparently quotes directly from the S&P announcement.
http://dmarron.com/2011/08/05/five-things-you-should-know-about-the-sp-downgrade/