More Chicago Style Politics

The SEC is a rule-making, investigatory, and enforcement agency of the U.S. designed to protect average people like you and me from abuses by powerful insiders within the financial industry who have the ability to rig and manipulate markets for their personal gain. In this instance, there was an unusually high-volume of short selling in stocks and U.S. securities on Friday before S & P announced the U.S. credit downgrade after the markets closed. This indicated a possible leak about the credit downgrade inside of S & P. There is never overt evidence of insider trading because it is done surrepticiously. What usually tips off investigators is unusual trading activity. Having worked on Wall Street, I know that insider trading is common and perpetrators are rarely caught. My beef with the rating agencies has to do with their credibility. In 2007-2008 they gave AAA top ratings to the high-risk derivatives and CDOs packaged with worthless sub prime mortgages that were traded world-wide. In doing so, they helped precipitate a world financial crisis. The same rating agencies - S & P, Moodys, and Fitch - were retained and paid by the investment banks that issued the derivatives - a clear conflict of interest in my judgment.

This is the example of no one trying to make this country better. They are all just trying to prove in their egotistical minds that they are right. I am actually glad Standard and Poor's downgraded us. I thought maybe this country would wake up to the foolishness that has been going on the last 10 years. Instead all we get is people trying to prove their point of how right they are for the reason this country sucks right now. You know why this country sucks is because everyone is acting like little children. While our troops are risking their lives each day so everyone can act like ignorant little children because their parents did not teach them no sense.

This is for appearances only. Since the "it's the Tea Party's fault" line only washes with the same crowd that still holds Obama up on its shoulders in the first place, they need to make it look as if there's something fishy going on here and that it's not this administration's doing that we were downgraded. More wasted time. More wasted money. If S&P were worth a damn, they'd downgrade us further, since the leader of our country is still talking about maybe possibly having a kinda plan after three years in. With full Democratic control of the entire government, they ignored debt, spent more, and pushed through healthcare as their big victory. They never addressed anything they should have. And then when the House gets taken, suddenly they frown and moan and pout and claim they want "balance" and actually want to get started on solving the tough economic problems in this country. BS. The entire goal of damn near everyone in Washington is to get elected again and again. To that end, this is just more of the same old political nonsense. Most politicians are just pissed now that the American people are making a fuss out of our debt and forcing their hands. Let's face the facts here. They're not used to working at all.

How many saw this coming. And yet, didn't the government just a few years ago launch an investigation into why some rating agencies didn't give lower ratings to bad loans, such as sub-prime mortgages? Yet here we are and they are investigating why they are down grading bad loans to a government that can't possibly pay the bill the way things are going? Funny how 'do as I say, unless it involves me' seems to be the motto of our government.

The problem lies in S&P's inability to truly defend the downgrade. With the White House protesting what they believed was a 2 Trillion dollar mistake in S&P's calculations, the company still went ahead with the rating change instead of checking their numbers. That was some pretty "Chicago style politics" right there. After the fact there was little the White House could do except look into some criminal reason for S&P insisting on changing the rating. Essentially it is more like S&P slandering America in a newspaper and the US looking to see if they can sue for libel, nothing at all like your analogy. If anything it is the S&P bullying the US into policy change using the credit rating as a weapon, a hostage or a blackmail item. Just because most of us want to see some policy change too doesn't make what S&P did right. S&P is lucky we don't declare it terrorism or treasonous! I know this could be viewed like the bully who steps up to stop a bully, but you should at least acknowledge BOTH are bullies. The White House, if you really call this bullying, is no more wrong than Standard & Poor's.