S&P Seen Surrendering to Tea Party Costing U.S. Taxpayer - Bloomberg
The rest of the story: Eric Cantor’s $350.00 dollar a bottle wine guzzling friends in ARQ hedgefunds are probably chortling like mad over the suckers they conned into this while they check for profits.
Standard & Poor’s, the rating company that downgraded the debt of the United States to AA from AAA for the first time, now finds itself assailed by investors led by billionaire Warren Buffett for making a political decision that has more to do with Tea Party politics than the financial stability of the U.S.
S&P officials, shrugging off a $2 trillion calculation error, blamed “uncertainty” in the policymaking process on Aug. 5 when they cut the assessment of the U.S. government’s ability to pay its debt, citing Congress’s failure to agree on as much long-term deficit reduction as the credit-rating company wanted. Buffett, the world’s most successful investor, said S&P erred and the U.S. should be rated “quadruple-A.”
The New York-based subsidiary of McGraw Hill Cos., whose inflated grades of mortgage-backed investments — paid for by the banks that created the toxic debt — were blamed by Congressional investigators for fueling the financial crisis, rattled investors around the world and provided fodder for President Barack Obama’s rivals in the 2012 elections. Treasuries rose, the dollar gained, global stock markets tumbled, oil sank and gold rallied to a record.