Standard & Poor's punished for doing their "job"

[Brocke]

Standard & Poor's: Downgrade Backlash Puts Credit Rating Company Under Microscope

New S&P Downgrades Reliable?

By JIM AVILA
Aug. 8, 2011

First, Standard & Poor's downgraded U.S. debt from AAA to AA+. Now critics in and out of government are returning fire -- downgrading the credit rating company rhetorically and perhaps soon putting it under a more official microscope.

Even as S&P issued new rating downgrades from AAA to AA+ against municipal entities backed by federal leases in Miami, Atlanta and Tacoma, Wash., according to Bloomberg, the Senate Banking Committee was looking at S&P, ABC News has learned.

A committee aide said the Democrat-controlled body "is looking into the issue and gathering more information" but emphasized that so far there was no official committee probe or investigation.

In Detroit today, as homeowners about to lose their houses to foreclosure tried to restructure their toxic mortgages once rated AAA by S&P, a populist backlash was forming against one of the most powerful economic voices in this country.

"What credibility does S&P have as a credit agency when they did such a terrible job?" asked Peter Lawler, a homeowner.

more: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/standard-poors-downgrade-backlash-puts-microscope-credit-rating/story?id=14260192

[Paranoid Puppet Master]

They aren't ready to admit to the rabble (us) that something is wrong so we keep living in fantasy land. The longer they can keep the ponzi scheme going the more they can get from us and the easier it will be when they decide to pull the rug out from under our feet - for example, since enough people are still living in denial, it was a piece of cake to pass the "super congress" without so much as a sigh from most people.

[Brocke]

Funny how they scream and yell at anyone who even hints that there is a problem. Even their own. Look at what they did to Strauss-Kahn and how they are raking Christine Legrande over the coals now. At some level they have gone totally rabid and they are attacking in all directions.

[Brocke]

Look out! 2008 on the horizon

August 9, 2011

THERE'S a certain irony that one of the key villains in the great financial meltdown of 2008 once again is creating economic havoc.

It was Standard & Poor's, along with fellow ratings agencies Moody's Investor Services and Fitch, that in the early part of the century conspired with caffeine and cocaine-fuelled Wall Street bankers to flood the world with trillions of dollars of worthless junk masquerading as rock solid, risk free investments.

By dishing out thousands of AAA ratings - for a handsome fee of course - the agencies ensured that governments, banks, and financial institutions across the developed world were loaded to the gills with toxic time bombs, all loosely based on high risk loans over marginal American real estate.
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Having man-handled global finance to the precipice, forcing the US government into a massive and prolonged bail-out of Wall Street and the economy, S&P, in a breathtaking display of arrogance and denial, has now sagely concluded that America is a credit risk.

Of course, America and Europe along with Japan are afflicted by a range of other quite fundamental problems.

But the disaster formerly known as the Great American Property Boom still looms large over the collective psyche of the northern hemisphere's richest nations.

Bailing out their cash-strapped banks merely transferred the problem to government finances while the prospect of bank failures and the ensuing recession clearly scared the pants off consumers, who now universally want to save rather than spend, regardless of how much stimulus is injected.

Even before S&P downgraded the US over the weekend, the rush to cash across the globe during the past fortnight has been nothing short of astounding.

Equities are being abandoned en masse in favour of fixed interest deposits as investors seek to preserve their capital. In Europe, meanwhile, banks are depositing cash with the European Central Bank rather than risk on-lending to each other as authorities bicker and argue about how to stave off defaults by Italy and Spain.

With nowhere to hide, investors out of desperation have settled on US Government bonds and gold, making life even tougher for European banks trying to raise cash, raising the spectre of another credit squeeze.

Meanwhile, the brains trust at S&P warned that, should America and Europe implode, we here in the South Pacific will also be affected. What tremendous insight!

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/business/look-out-2008-on-the-horizon-20110808-1ij6c.html#ixzz1UaXTpd5a