Standard & Poor’s Downgrade: How Debt Has Defined Human History - Speakeasy - WSJ
►http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2011/08/06/how-debt-has-defined-human-history
Yesterday’s much-anticipated S&P downgrade of U.S. treasury bonds is obviously a historic event.
Now, S&P might seem a peculiar choice as ultimate credit court, considering their decidedly less-than-stellar performance in the mortgage crisis—giving AAA ratings to a series of toxic derivatives that ultimately crashed the world economy, causing major financial institutions to have to be bailed out by the very government whose bonds they’ve just downgraded. But what’s the alternative? The IMF? It has troubles of its own, to put it mildly.