Standard and Poor’s vindicates Tea Party with downgrade of U.S. Debt.

While the Tea Party gets slated as a bunch of extremists, the truth is they're a legitimate mass movement. And they've just been proved right.

Written by John Vax
6 August 2011 at 11am


Save capitalism. The message is simple.

First off, I should start with a caveat. I have no love for the ratings agencies.

They have had a pretty miserable track record at performing their primary function, which is to assist investors in assessing the risks of bonds issued by governments and corporations by assigning a rating.

They are often way behind the curve when it comes to spotting issuers who are getting into trouble or they get it completely wrong from the start, like they did with ratings on portfolios of mortgages and sophisticated financial instruments known as collateralised debt obligations (CDOs).

That being said, late Friday evening, one of the major credit ratings agencies, Standard and Poor’s, downgraded the debt of the United States from its “triple Aâ€