Monday, December 1, 2008
Is Uncle Sam Blackmailing the Credit Rating Agencies?
As I have previously written, based upon standard criteria, America should lose its AAA sovereign credit rating.
Last night, at an investment talk I attended, the manager of more than a billion dollars in investments said the same thing.
Interestingly, he asked out loud whether Uncle Sam is blackmailing the credit rating agencies.
What does he mean?
Well, the credit-rating agencies committed fraud in keeping the credit ratings for corporations where failing too high for years. (See this and this). The government could easily prosecute them criminally for fraud.
But the government wants to keep its AAA credit rating. And the same companies that fraudulently kept corporate credit ratings too high could keep America's sovereign credit rating too high, if they have a little . . . incentive.
3 comments:
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But at some point everyone (foreign sovereigns) must realize that the rating is fraudulent and meaningless - at which point blackmail will be pointless too.
ReplyDeleteSheeple will believe, say and do anything to maintain the status quo. That's the only reason the ratings agencies haven't toppled yet. That and the fact there's no alternative. But to quote Krugman from last year...
ReplyDelete"one of these days there will be a Wile E. Coyote moment for the dollar: the moment when the cartoon character, who has run off a cliff, looks down and realizes that he’s standing on thin air – and plunges. In this case, investors suddenly realize that Stein’s Law applies — “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop” – and they realize they need to get out of dollars, causing the currency to plunge. Maybe the dollar’s Wile E. Coyote moment has arrived – although, again, I’ve been wrong about this so far."
Who would like to go out on a limb in writing & submit that the raters are NOT Illumiati-friendly? I have a real bargain on an igloo here in Red Canaduh for you.
ReplyDelete~"Word has it, that somewhere in Kenya, just as in Kennebunkport, a small village is missing its idiot."~