[quote=jstoesz]I resent the title of this post. It is beyond stupid to lay the blame of the downgrade on the tea party. Now you could easily call it the repub/dem downgrade.[/quote]
I call it what it is: “The S & P Downgrade”. A decision made by a company with, as far as I’m concerned, no credibility. And a decision made with NO concern for their investor clients, as they’ve tried to claim. And a decision made with what was apparently a total lack of even superficially critical thought.
However, S & P is entitled to make its own decisions, and act upon them. The issue I have is with those who are trusting the experience and intellectual capital that is supposedly behind the decision to downgrade. After the mortgage bond ratings debacle, why would ANYONE trust in the abilities of S & P? Their actions (along with other ratings agencies) were a key factor in a financial meltdown that brought the financial system of the United States (and many other nations as well) to its knees.
The fact that greed was the motivating factor in S & P’s decision to award AAA+ ratings to junk mortgage bonds should have been a trigger for mass customer defection, putting them out of business. After all, when the product you are selling is expertise as verified by client trust, and you intentionally and single-mindedly decide to violate that trust, what do you have left to sell? But S & P’s inability to predict the disastrous fallout of its decision to assure its clients of the safety of the mortgage bonds demonstrated that, with or without a moral compass, they lacked the basic intelligence desirable in a company that sells investment advice.
No, I blame S & P for making the decision to downgrade, but that was their prerogative. However, I have a major issue with all the idiots out there who, despite clear cut evidence to the contrary, still obviously see S & P as a trustworthy source of investment advice, as evidenced by their panicked reaction to the downgrade. It’s not S & P’s decision that is creating the problem. It’s the REACTION of the so-called financial experts (institutional and government) to a decision made by a morally and intellectually bankrupt company, who once again has made a decision carrying long-term potentially disastrous world-wide consequences with absolutely no thought given to them. And I blame our government for providing special privileges to S & P, not only in relieving them of responsibility for the execution of prior disastrous decisions, but also for allowing them to continue to pose a danger of making more of them.
