Sunday, August 7, 2011

Republicans, its our way, or we'll destroy the highway

Standard and Poor on Friday reduced the US credit rating from AAA to AA+.  Standard and Poor and the rest of the credit rating agencies were directly culpable for the financial collapse.  The credit rating agencies  rated mortgage securities that were junk or inherently very risky as safe and profitable investments, which allowed the banks to sell them to unsuspecting clients who along with everyone else lost trillions when the bottom fell out of the housing market.  The report from S&P sounds like an indictment against the republicans and the tea party.  Below are some quotes from the full S&P press release
The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America’s governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed. The statutory debt ceiling and the threat of default have become political bargaining chips in the debate over fiscal policy. Despite this year’s wide-ranging debate, in our view, the differences between political parties have proven to be extraordinarily difficult to bridge, and, as we see it, the resulting agreement fell well short of the comprehensive fiscal consolidation program that some proponents had envisaged until quite recently.
 Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.
The outlook on the long-term rating is negative. As our downside alternate fiscal scenario illustrates, a higher public debt trajectory than we currently assume could lead us to lower the long-term rating again. On the other hand, as our upside scenario highlights, if the recommendations of the Congressional Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction–independently or coupled with other initiatives, such as the lapsing of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for high earners–lead to fiscal consolidation measures beyond the minimum mandated, and we believe they are likely to slow the deterioration of the government’s debt dynamics, the long-term rating could stabilize at ‘AA+’.
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