Standard & Poors or Dumb & Dumber?

Should the name be Standard & Poors or Dumb & Dumber? Here's a very good analysis in The Nation.

And another by Joe Nocera in the New York Times.

The Times is also reporting that the S.E.C. has downgraded S&P back for their own failings. Why didn't the S.E.C. downgrade the credit raters credibility earlier?

Remember, S&P and Moody's and Fitch were the ones who rated Enron AAA and did the same for the fraudulent toxic securities Wall Street dumped on customers prior to the 2008 collapse. The credit rating agencies caused the collapse by selling their ratings rather than making corporations earn them. And who had to clean up the mess? Taxpayers. It's S&P's mistakes that have ballooned our national debt. As I said the other day, blaming Obama for this is like blaming the surgeon for the cancer you wanted removed.

The real causes get lost in the noise as mommy and daddy argue. The problems we have aren't obscure or hard to understand, just hard to hear anyone talk about on television, unless you count Jon Stewart who may be the best explainer around. Maybe it's because he's allowed to use obscenities. We need them to describe what is going on.

Then there's the dull, boring but pithy and usually dead-on correct Brookings Institution.

But these causes are just political. The real cause of America's thirty year decline has been Reaganomics. Ronald Reagan (who was officially declared a god several years ago) established the rule that people who work should be paid less and pay more in taxes, and that people who own and don't work at all or work very little should reap the big rewards and pay taxes at a lower rate.

This dynamic took a robust economy and made it fragile, nervous, unstable and underfed. What feeds an economy? Incomes from honest work. Who has thrived most in Reagan's economy? The predators, the parasites, the "creative destroyers", the manipulators, the people who shuffle money rather than making products or delivering services. Reaganomics has hollowed out the America we grew up in, moving the wealth and the productivity offshore to low-wage havens and their private islands. Maybe Americans are finally waking up to this. I hope so.

Blaming the Surgeon for the Cancer He's Removing

Today's Must-Read is from the Daily Beast, Tina Brown's hard-hitting digital newspaper. And nobody deserves to be hit harder than Standard & Poors.

As Noni Prins's article explains, S&P was "factory-stamping" AAA bond ratings on all the garbage Wall Street could manufacture in the run up to the financial meltdown of 2007-2008, and pocketing enormous fees.

The U.S. debt problem right now, which S & P is deploring, is largely made up of S & P's toxic garbage that we taxpayers (and our government) had to clean up.

A bit like blaming the surgeon for the cancer he's been asked to remove. The U.S. government removed the cancerous investments S&P and Moody's fed into the U.S. economy.

Instead of S & P downgrading U.S. Treasury Bonds, the U.S. Justice Department ought to be putting S & P on trial for its massive fraud. But major financial players appear to have total immunity.

This would be outrageous satire if it were satire, but it's not. It's all true, and we're paying for it.