S&P’s $2 Trillion gaffe downgrading democracy and upgrading oligarchy

Eleven days after lowering the credit rating on the U.S. for the first time, Standard & Poor’s is suffering a downgrade among global investors as American bonds are proving world beaters -- undermining S&P’s mathematical assumptions -- and prompting disbelief among political scientists months after the company upgraded China because of the stability fostered by Communist Party rule.
China has been upgraded five times by S&P since 1999, Bloomberg data show. “We believe the Chinese authorities would respond to future threats to financial stability with timely measures, based on our observations over the past two years,” S&P said Dec. 16 in a statement.

Since S&P, the New York-based subsidiary of McGraw-Hill Cos., dropped the U.S. to AA+ from AAA on Aug. 5, the yield on the 10-year Treasury note, a benchmark for everything from home mortgages to car loans, has declined to as low as 2.03 percent from a high this year of 3.77 percent, with American debt on pace in August for the biggest monthly gain since December 2008. Interest rates on American bonds are lower today than on most of the countries with AAA ratings by S&P and the Treasury recently financed its outstanding debt at the lowest cost ever.

If anything, the decision from S&P, the largest ratings provider, resulted in an upgrade of U.S. securities as the American bond market outperformed world bond indexes during the period since the downgrade by S&P. Moody’s Investors Service and Fitch Ratings, the two next biggest rating companies, affirmed their AAA rankings on the U.S.

“The market has upgraded U.S. Treasuries,” said Andrew Johnson, the head of investment-grade fixed-income in Chicago at Neuberger Berman Fixed Income LLC, which oversees $85 billion. “Treasuries are still where people run to hide at least temporarily and that’s what we’ve seen over the past week.”

S&P made its decision, saying the U.S. government is becoming “less stable, less effective and less predictable,” even after acknowledging to the Treasury Department a $2 trillion error in its calculations that by its own methodology could have prevented any change from a AAA rating. Since S&P still insisted on downgrading the U.S. eight months after raising China’s rating, the company’s credibility has come under increasing scrutiny.

“It was really kind of bizarre that they’ve become political analysts,” said Thomas Mann, a congressional scholar at the Washington-based Brookings Institution. “I certainly never look to any of the three rating agencies as a source of expertise, knowledge or wisdom on the political system.”

When Warren Buffett was asked about S&P’s decision, the billionaire chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. said the U.S. should have been upgraded to “quadruple-A.”

The cut left the U.S., whose currency accounts for about 60 percent of the world’s reserves, rated below at least 15 other nations and on the same level as Belgium, which hasn’t had a government since June 2010.