S&P conspiracy

Weeks before the S&P downgrade of U.S debt, many financial institutions made significant changes to their by-laws to allowing them to hold non triple A rated assets. It seems to me that theses various institutions knew that the downgrade was coming, but how did they time it so perfectly?

Either A: They are working for/with the republicans, and this is an attempt to make Obama look bad. [If this is true, it seems to be working]

Or B: They are working for/with the government to create panic within the financial sector in order to get the public to support tax increases.

Or maybe a bit of both. If you really think about it everyone knew U.S debt was garbage long before the downgrade [even most of the countries that are allowed to keep their AAA rating debt is garbage], but why change the rating now? It makes no sense to me, there has to be another reason behind this.

What do you think?

Or they knew about the debt ceiling and that either the US would get downgraded for not fixing it, or whatever solution would not be effective enough to prevent a downgrade. They are in finance after all.

I love when people call out shady actions by government and financial institutions, but this really seems like a non issue.

Most financial institutions 'price in' future changes before people like you and I can make investment decisions. The job of their analysts are to analyze the data and predict a most likely outcome.

Prior to the budget talk, S&P made it clear that to keep the current credit rating, the US had to cut $4T cut in spending, and after all that haggling spending was only cut $2T. The drop in credit rating was predictable.

The gentleman from S&P that was on FOX today said they went to the government ahead of time letting them know that the downgrade was possible. So I am sure that if the people in the government were made aware, then by extension so were their "contributing" constituents.

reply to post by Rockdisjoint


Could be there new partners.
www.standardandpoors.com... ame%3DSapient_061411.pdf&blobheadername2=Content-Disposition&blobheadervalue1=application%2Fpdf&blobkey=id&blobheadername1=content-type&blobwhere=1243 916752220&blobheadervalue3=UTF-8

finance.yahoo.com...

sapient global markets
www.sapient.com...

reply to post by Dbriefed

The job of their analysts are to analyze the data and predict a most likely outcome.

That's fine and dandy, but you guys aren't understanding what I'm talking about =/

The main goal of a financial institution is to make profit. Why would any rational bank ``decrease`` their holding standards to buy more bad U.S debt? I'm no professional analyst here, but if a govt openly admits that it would default on its debt obligations if it could not incur ``more`` debt -- I wouldn't be rushing to buy those bonds.