SMH 9 Aug 2011
There's a certain irony that one of the key villains in the great financial meltdown of 2008 once again is creating economic havoc.
It was Standard & Poor's, along with fellow ratings agencies Moody's Investor Services and Fitch, that in the early part of the century conspired with caffeine- and cocaine-fuelled Wall Street bankers to flood the world with trillions of dollars of worthless junk masquerading as rock solid, risk-free investments.
By dishing out thousands of AAA ratings - for a handsome fee of course - the agencies ensured that governments, banks, and financial institutions across the developed world were loaded to the gills with toxic time bombs, all loosely based on high risk loans over marginal American real estate.
Having man-handled global finance to the precipice, forcing the US government into a massive and prolonged bailout of Wall Street and the economy, S&P, in a breathtaking display of arrogance and denial, has sagely concluded that America is a credit risk.
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