S&P Downgrades US to AA+

[Jagermeister]

I'll take "A bunch of illiterate bigoted religious zealot scumbags intent on destroying the country financially and socially due to the fact they want to impose their scumbag ideology on the rest of the country and oh yeah, because a black guy is POTUS" for 500, Alex...

Great take jhale.

[Jagermeister]

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20002529-503544.html

Tea Party Supporters: Who They Are and What They Believe



They're white. They're older. And they're angry.



CBS News and the New York Times surveyed 1,580 adults, including 881 self-identified Tea Party supporters, to get a snapshot of the Tea Party movement. There is a lot of information to unpack; let's begin with the demographics.


Eighteen percent of Americans identify as Tea Party supporters. The vast majority of them -- 89 percent -- are white. Just one percent is black.


They tend to skew older: Three in four are 45 years old or older, including 29 percent who are 65 plus. They are also more likely to be men (59 percent) than women (41 percent).


More than one in three (36 percent) hails from the South, far more than any other region. Twenty-five percent come from the West, 22 percent from the Midwest, and 18 percent from the northeast.



They are better educated than most Americans: 37 percent are college graduates, compared to 25 percent of Americans overall. They also have a higher-than-average household income, with 56 percent making more than $50,000 per year.


More than half (54 percent) identify as Republicans, and another 41 percent say they are independents. Just five percent call themselves Democrats, compared to 31 percent of adults nationwide.


Nearly three in four describe themselves as conservative, and 39 percent call themselves very conservative. Sixty percent say they always or usually vote Republican. Forty percent say the United States needs a third party, while 52 percent say it does not.


They are more likely than American adults overall to attend religious services weekly (38 percent do so) and to call themselves evangelical (39 percent). Sixty-one percent are Protestant, and another 22 percent are Catholic.


More than half -- 58 percent -- keep a gun in the household.


Are you a bigot jhale?

[Nickdfresh]

There's plenty of blame to go around.

Time to buy stock, fellas!

Apparently lots did!

[Dr. Love]

Interesting video

[FORD]

Interesting video, but of course they left out the solution - which is to roll back every destructive bullshit policy (treasonous trade deals, tax "cuts" for rich tax dodgers, etc) and start making shit here again.

[Jagermeister]

Fuck S&P......

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[SunisinuS]

Agreed. I say put Wall Street on a voucher system, they can all play monopoly with monopoly money and then cash it in for a free drink at McDonalds. The rest use accepted currency. You play, you get monopoly money.

http://www.thepostgame.com/blog/daily-take/201108/did-mark-cuban-predict-market-crash

It's been a year of vindication for Mark Cuban. The owner of the Dallas Mavericks quieted a lot of the critics who said he was a loudmouth who didn't know how to run a basketball franchise. Now his team is the best in basketball.

But Cuban is also proving somewhat prophetic in a much more unsettling way. In the spring of last year, only three days after the harrowing May 6 "Flash Crash" that temporarily plunged the Dow Jones Industrial Average more than 1,000 points within minutes, he wrote a blog post that seems chilling today. He titled it, "What Business is Wall Street In?" And toward the end, he wrote in bold, "There will be another crash."

Granted, there are a lot of doomsayers out there. But Cuban is not that. He's a successful businessman -- he sold his Internet start-up in 1999 for $5.9 billion in Yahoo! stock -- and he says he's been involved in the stock market for the better part of a decade. But what makes his post stand out even more is that he named a specific reason for the predicted "crash" -- professional traders.

"The only people who know what business Wall Street is in are the traders," Cuban wrote on May 9, 2010. "They know what business Wall Street is in better than everyone else. To traders, whether day traders or high frequency or somewhere in between, Wall Street has nothing to do with creating capital for businesses, its original goal. Wall Street is a platform. It's a platform to be exploited by every technological and intellectual means possible."

And more than a year later, a lot of Wall Street experts are blaming high frequency trading for this month's extreme stock market volatility. The swings are wild, to the tune of hundreds of Dow points within minutes, and "the machines" profiled last year by 60 Minutes are getting a lot of the blame.


Cuban went on to make another point, about how entire nations are now bought and sold within seconds and even nanoseconds:

"It’s hard to believe," he wrote, "but evaluating countries as an investment is now easier than evaluating companies."

Lo and behold, the current malaise on Wall Street is tied not to the earnings of public companies -- which are largely strong -- but to the debt load of national economies.

But Cuban came back again to the traders, who he called "hackers" because, he said, they look for weaknesses in the system to exploit for short-term gain. "The Government needs to create incentives for this business," he wrote, "and extract compensation from the traders/hackers for the systemic failure level of risk they introduce."

He concluded again in bold text with a scary forecast that, although not completely unique to him, now looks more and more accurate:

"There will be another crash, because there are too many players looking for the trillion dollar score."

As of this writing, the Dow Jones sits at 10,719, within 200 points of the 10,520 price at the close of trading on May 6, 2010, the day of the Flash Crash. The Dow has dropped almost exactly 2,000 points in the last month.

[Jagermeister]

I like that guy. Smart sum bitch.

[SunisinuS]

Just like I advised:

Los Angeles downgraded, drops Standard & Poor's

Los Angeles drops Standard & Poor's credit rating firm after city investments downgraded to AA


On Thursday August 18, 2011, 9:44 am EDT
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- The city of Los Angeles will no longer hire Standard & Poor's to rate its $7 billion general investment pool because the firm recently downgraded the city's portfolio from AAA to AA.

Interim Treasurer Steve Ongele says the city has lost faith in S&P's judgment.

The Los Angeles Times ( http://lat.ms/oa5dt8) reports Ongele told the City Council's Budget and Finance Committee this week that the city should be proud for cutting ties with S&P.

He notes the market crash that came with the real estate debacle occurred because rating agencies like S&P gave unworthy corporations AAA ratings.

Ongele says canceling the contract will save the city $16,000 a year.

Information from: Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com

[Seshmeister]

I'm no expert but since the whole world economy is built on US debt and every trust fund, pension and country for that matter would be fucked it went under it seems kind of senseless to mark the US bonds down. If for example the US defaults on all her debts every country in Europe goes down too so how can most of them have a higher credit rating?

It's illogical.

What they should have said is everyone is down to AA or AAA is what AA now used to be.

I wonder if all these cunt leeches in banking ever have moments where they realise that their whole lives are entirely pointless to humanity.

[binnie]

I'm no expert but since the whole world economy is built on US debt and every trust fund, pension and country for that matter would be fucked it went under it seems kind of senseless to mark the US bonds down. If for example the US defaults on all her debts every country in Europe goes down too so how can most of them have a higher credit rating?

It's illogical.

What they should have said is everyone is down to AA or AAA is what AA now used to be.

I wonder if all these cunt leeches in banking ever have moments where they realise that their whole lives are entirely pointless to humanity.

Their lives aren't 'pointless' to humanity - our entire luxurious, ease-filled and consumer driven lives are the result of the banking system. Sad but true, we are their children whether we like it or not.

[Seshmeister]

Toilet talk.

[Blaze]

Report: U.S. investigating S&P over mortgages

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department is investigating the rating agency Standard & Poor's over its actions on mortgages leading up to the financial crisis, a source familiar with the matter said on Thursday.
The investigation -- which the source said relates to what S&P analysts wanted to do and what they were told to do instead -- began before the ratings firm, downgraded the long-term U.S. debt to AA-plus from a AAA rating this month.
The probe is being led by the Justice Department's civil division, the source said, declining to be further identified because the investigation is ongoing and not public.
The Justice Department has also been investigating the rating firm Moody's in connection with the ratings of structured products during the financial crisis, a source familiar with that matter told Reuters.
Michael Adler, a spokesman for Moody's, did not immediately return a phone call and email message seeking comment.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has also been probing S&P, a unit of McGraw-Hill, over its role in the crisis, the first source said.
Representatives for the Justice Department and SEC declined to comment.
Confirmation of the probes come after the New York Times reported that the S&P investigation centers on whether the company improperly rated dozens of mortgage securities in the years before the financial crisis that unfolded in 2008.
The department has been asking about instances in which S&P analysts wanted to assign lower ratings to mortgage bonds but may have been overruled by S&P business managers, the newspaper reported.
Ed Sweeney, a spokesman for S&P, said ...

Read the rest of the story here: http://news.yahoo.com/u-investigatin...044321855.html

[sadaist]

It's really hard to watch these huge powerful governments be fucking crybabies. The whole it's my ball and if I can't play no one can attitude is lame. S&P just downgraded Los Angeles. Most likely 100% accurate in doing so. So now LA gets mad at them, says they are cutting all ties with them.

The USA gets downgraded and lets it slip that they are investigating S&P now.

Anyways, LA & the US deserved to be downgraded one notch due to their horrible financial practices.

__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ ___

Los Angeles downgraded, drops Standard & Poor's
Los Angeles drops Standard & Poor's credit rating firm after city investments downgraded to AA

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Los-Angeles-downgraded-drops-apf-1282880481.html

On Thursday August 18, 2011, 9:44 am EDT

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- The city of Los Angeles will no longer hire Standard & Poor's to rate its $7 billion general investment pool because the firm recently downgraded the city's portfolio from AAA to AA.

Interim Treasurer Steve Ongele says the city has lost faith in S&P's judgment.

The Los Angeles Times ( http://lat.ms/oa5dt8) reports Ongele told the City Council's Budget and Finance Committee this week that the city should be proud for cutting ties with S&P.

He notes the market crash that came with the real estate debacle occurred because rating agencies like S&P gave unworthy corporations AAA ratings.

Ongele says canceling the contract will save the city $16,000 a year.

Information from: Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com

[SunisinuS]

I am sorry....What does S&P make again? Do they make cars?


As stated about.....grandparents did not need credit to buy anything in their life....the might have got a loan. But, I am sorry, I do not think we need credit rating services around.<-------Period. The are Leeches just like RIAA and the record labels. Sorry. They only sprang up recently....we have been doing fine without them for thousands of years.

Buying into their own self created "system" is horsehit. Let's see: I am going to invent a consulting business and just follow you around all day, giving you a blue star and a red start on everything you do. Brushing your teeth.....Red Star, sorry just not good enough...ect ect. Now....convince all your friends to hire me as well....and actually start to BELIEVE that your life never existed any other way! I mean, I have created the perfect scam. Tell all your friends....and eventually, as everyone does, you will get yourself "disliked" by me. Then your friends can continue to brush their teeth the way I tell them to....while you find it hard to buy a toothbrush. Enjoy?

See the City of La actually has to create and work and repair and plan things: S&P can suck my dick.


Just like the WORKING Treasurer (or did all the schooling come from a matchbook back) said to S&P: We no longer require your services. If everybody in the financial world did that......would S&P downgrade their own rating?

Comedy. It is a pack of fucking lies that that industry made up and hopes that people are uneducated enough to notice it.