Standards & Poor's is a company, nothing more nothing less; but it has just threatened 15 Euro Zone countries with downgrading their creditworthiness and those sovereign countries are expected to react to this single company's musings by changing economic policies that will affect over half a billion citizens.
When a single company can dictate economic policy to 15 countries and half a billion people, we don't have democracy; we have a tyranny that is worse than that used by any Self-serving Monarch or Evil dictator in the past history of mankind.
The Euro Zone should tell Standards & Poor's to ****** (expletives deleted), make its sort of trading illegal, ban it and stop it from blackmailing democratically elected governments in future.
The answer to the current economic crisis is not to bow to the markets that created and are exacerbating the crisis. The answer is to regulate the markets so that companies like Standards and Poors can no longer profit out of the economic misery that they wish to impose on billions of people for the sake of a fast buck for their few shareholders.
There is an old saying where I come from
ReplyDelete"If you owe the store $10 and you can't afford to pay it YOUR IN TROUBLE! If you owe the store $10,000 and you can't afford to pay it THE STORE IS IN TROUBLE!"
The markets are the store, it's time for governments to tell them to back off because the trouble is THEIRS!
Good point anon!
ReplyDeleteIf all 27 members of the EC said sod it we are not paying back what we owe and went bankrupt what would happen?
Who would be left with the final IOU's?
Who would be the real losers?
The banks - which means the pension funds - which means you and me....
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately we are all living on borrowed money and if the wheels stop spinning we will all fall off and it will not be pretty!
Penddu
Well said Alwyn.
ReplyDeleteThe rule of the people, democracy, has to be more sacred than the rule of finance.
If only S&P had been this vocal when the biggest credit bubble in history was forming the west would not be in quite such a deep mire now. Unfortunately they did n't and convinced themselves that sub-prime mortgages were a AAA+ asset. Oh how we laughed.
ReplyDeleteNow they are telling the truth: which is that unless something radical happens in euroland (ie a break up or Germany bankrupting itself to bail out the south) the game will be up.
Well said Alwyn! I have long believed that these so called ratings agencies have far too much power and influence and as you identify they are outside of any democratic control. Coupled with the speculators who are quite happy to profit by bringing a national or multi-national currency to its knees, we are viewing Capitalism at its soulless, morally bankrupt worse.
ReplyDeleteIf anything good is to come from this it has to be the realisation that there must be a better way to transact business based on common decent human values. The sleazy, trashy Reagan/Thatcher business model deserves to be consigned to the dustbin of history along with the toxic offshoots that were spawned by this odious Neo-Liberal lie. I truly hope the "99" movement will be the catalyst!
S & P are part of the problem. They were hand in glove with the banks, hedge funds and insurance companies that got us in this mess by giving AAA ratings to repackaged sub-prime mortgages and all the rest. They were still giving top ratings to Merrill Lynch and all the others up to when they went bankrupt.
ReplyDeleteTherefore S & P and the other US ratings agencies are totally discredited. Which is why I'm amazed that the media still reports their pronouncements.