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The Occupy movement , along with the entire liberal and MSM outlets shall reverse their position on placating banks in less than a week. Wait for it.

New Zealand's credit rating has been downgraded by two of the three major ratings agencies amid increased global concern over high debt burdens in developed nations. Fitch and Standard & Poor's on Friday downgraded New Zealand from an AA+ rating to AA. In the past, New Zealand has enjoyed strong sovereign credit ratings due to relatively low levels of government borrowing that offset worries about the country's high private debt. However, the ratings agencies have become less sanguine after an earthquake and weak economic growth strained the government's finances. The agencies are taking a harder line on any form of...

Standard & Poor's President Deven Sharma is leaving the credit-rating firm at the end of the year, according to a person familiar with the matter. The credit-rating firm plans to announce Mr. Sharma's exit on Tuesday before the markets open, the person said. Douglas Peterson, chief operating officer of Citigroup Inc.'s Citibank unit, will succeed Mr. Sharma on Sept. 12, that person said.

The Justice Department is investigating whether the nation’s largest credit ratings agency, Standard & Poor’s, improperly rated dozens of mortgage securities in the years leading up to the financial crisis, according to two people interviewed by the government and another briefed on such interviews. The investigation began before Standard & Poor’s cut the United States’ AAA credit rating this month, but it is likely to add fuel to the political firestorm that has surrounded that action. Lawmakers and some administration officials have since questioned the agency’s secretive process, its credibility and the competence of its analysts, claiming to have found...

The only way President Barack Obama can solve the nation’s economic woes is to adopt “common-sense” Reaganomics, the policy’s architect Arthur Laffer claims in an exclusive Newsmax.TV interview. Laffer said the White House called him in the spring and asked him to speak to Obama’s former Council of Economic Advisors’ chairman Austen Goolsbee – and he had told him exactly the same thing. “Reaganomics would fix any economy that’s in the doldrums,” Laffer said. “It’s not a magic sauce, it’s common sense. “You’ve got to get rid of all federal taxes in the extreme and replace them with a low-rate...

n the first of what will be a closely watched selection process for a powerful new deficit panel, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced he will appoint Democratic Sens. Patty Murray (Wash.), Max Baucus (Mont.) and John Kerry (Mass.) as his three choices for a super committee charged with finding more than $1 trillion in spending cuts by the end of this year. Murray will serve as co-chair of the 12-member panel. Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) will select her co-chair and two other panelists, as required by the debt limit agreement signed into law by President Barack Obama last week....

Society will survive and law and order will prevail. And it is within the realm of possibilities that some extremists will propose draconian measures requiring, for example, that offenders be corralled in their own neighborhoods behind concrete barriers and chain linked fences. This would be a pretty ugly America.

<p>After Standard & Poor’s bit an appendage from the U.S.’s credit rating, the credit-rating firm is smelling blood in the water at Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.</p> <p>Berkshire, which make big chunks of money from its insurance and reinsurance businesses, is spared the loss of its AA+ rating for now. But S&P marked Berkshire’s outlook down to “negative” from stable.” UPDATE: Buffett told Fox Business Network he isn’t surprised about S&P’s move. S&P had telegraphed plans to knock down insurers if the U.S. were downgraded.</p>

WASHINGTON (AP) - Government-controlled Freddie Mac is asking for $1.5 billion in additional federal aid after posting a loss this spring. The mortgage giant says it lost $4.69 billion, or $1.44 cents per share, in April-June quarter. That takes into account $1.6 billion in dividends paid to the Treasury Department. It compares with a loss of $6 billion, or $1.85 per share, during the same quarter in 2010. The government rescued McLean, Va.-based Freddie Mac and sibling company Fannie Mae in September 2008 after massive losses on risky mortgages threatened to topple them. Standard & Poor's cited the link to...

WASHINGTON (CNNMoney) -- Little is known about key details that led Standard & Poor's to downgrade U.S. debt late Friday, despite its outsized repurcussions. While the move knocking U.S. debt down a notch from the lofty AAA rating has exacerbated an already skittish stock market and drawn criticism from the White House, key details are a mystery. S&P doesn't say who, exactly, made the decision at the company; what kind of weight they gave U.S. politics versus ability to pay; or to what extent they felt pressured to downgrade the United States in response to criticism of its downgrades of...

Liberal firebrand Michael Moore called on President Obama to respond to the U.S. credit downgrade by arresting the leaders of the credit-ratings agencies. On his Twitter feed Monday, the Oscar-winning film director also blamed the 2008 economic collapse on Standard & Poor’s — apparently because it and other credit-ratings agencies did not downgrade mortgage-based bonds, which encouraged the housing bubble and let it spread throughout the economy. “Pres Obama, show some guts & arrest the CEO of Standard & Poors. These criminals brought down the economy in 2008& now they will do it again,” Mr. Moore wrote.

It was about time the president weighed in with a statement about the U.S. credit rating downgrade by Standard & Poor’s. And that’s not just because the reporters in the room were getting antsy after the president was 50 minutes late getting started. Rather, Obama’s press briefing Monday afternoon about the Standard & Poor’s downgrade came after a weekend in which the primary messaging strategy from the White House seemed to be excuses. Following a bizarre back and forth Friday evening in the news over whether the ratings agency got its math right—a “has it really come to this?” moment...

.....Yet, as S&P has explained, unlike the administration and the CBO, it focuses on a three-to-five year window. S&P finds that this timeframe, which is more in the control of the current Congress and president, is a more reliable predictor of financial health than illusory ten-year forecasts....

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan on Sunday ruled out the chance of a US default following S&P's decision to downgrade America's credit rating. The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default" said Greenspan on NBC's Meet the Press. "What I think the S&P thing did was to hit a nerve that there's something basically bad going on, and it's hit the self-esteem of the United States, the psyche" said Greenspan.

World leaders made emergency conference calls Sunday, seeking solutions to the US debt and eurozone crises ahead of a feared disastrous reopening of markets on Monday. In a possible bellwether, Israel's market fell seven percent. World leaders searched Sunday for answers to a global debt crisis, hoping to head off a massacre on markets spooked by an unprecedented US rating downgrade and Europe's swelling malaise. France and Germany called for full implementation of measures agreed at a eurozone summit in July to safeguard the single currency as markets braced for fresh turmoil this week. "President (Nicolas) Sarkozy and Chancellor (Angela)...

S&P's Beers: We Don't Have a Hit List Published: Sunday, 7 Aug 2011 | 8:58 PM ET By: Deepanshu Bagchee Supervising Digital Editor, CNBC Asia After Standard and Poor's historic downgrade of the U.S.'s credit rating to AA-plus from triple-A, fears are growing that other countries may be next, most notably France, which is facing big costs from a bailout of troubled Euro zone countries. But the global head of sovereign ratings at S&P says the agency does not have a target list and will downgrade ratings as and when it sees deteriorating economic performance or debt burdens. "We don't...

WASHINGTON – The credit rating agency Standard & Poor's showed "terrible judgment" in lowering the U.S. government's credit rating, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Sunday. "They've handled themselves very poorly. And they've shown a stunning lack of knowledge about the basic U.S. fiscal budget math," Geithner said in his first public comments about the credit rating decision. Interviewed on CNBC, Geither said that U.S. Treasury securities were just as safe now as they were before S&P announced its downgrade. He predicted that China and investors would remain strong purchasers of U.S. government debt. Republicans have blamed President Barack Obama for...

Markets react to ratings cuts in the U.S.STORY HIGHLIGHTS NEW: Investors are weighing both the downgrade and the Investors are waiting anxiously for major world markets to open for Monday trading, following the U.S. credit rating downgrade to AA+ from the top rank of AAA. Stock futures tumbled more than 2% at the start of electronic trading Sunday, signaling a nasty investor reaction According to data from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, S&P 500 futures fell 30 points, or 2.7%. Nasdaq-100 futures contracts slipped 54 points, or 2.5%. Dow Jones industrial average futures were 292 points, or 2.6%, lower. The futures...

U.S. Treasury debt is as safe as it was before a Standard & Poor's rating downgrade of the United States and Congress' "damaging" debate over raising the country's debt limit, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said on Sunday. Geithner, in an interview with NBC/CNBC television, also called on European leaders to ensure that there is an "unequivocal financial backstop" for euro zone governments facing fiscal and debt problems. He added that a double-dip recession was unlikely if governments and central banks made good decisions. Asked whether Treasuries were as safe now as they were last week, Geithner replied: "Absolutely. And the...

Standard & Poor’s downgrade of the nation’s credit rating gives House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan every right to say “I told you so.” Even earlier this week when President Obama was taking his victory lap for the debt-ceiling compromise, Ryan was disclosing the cold, hard truths of the economic troubles that lie ahead — truths that a jittery Wall Street has been more than aware of. In an oped column in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, the Wisconsin Republican reiterated, of course, that the president really has no budget plan. “The president’s February budget,” he wrote, “deliberately dodged the tough...