December 6, 2011
Standard & Poor’s, rebuked by Warren Buffett in August after downgrading the U.S. over government gridlock, is again injecting itself into the political process, just as European leaders are poised to meet for a summit aimed at ending the region’s sovereign-debt crisis.
The ratings firm put Germany, France and 13 other euro-area nations on review for a downgrade yesterday, saying “continuing disagreements among European policy makers on how to tackle” the region’s debt crisis risk damaging their financial stability. The move came four months after S&P cut the U.S. to AA+, saying “extremely difficult” political discussions over how to reduce America’s more than $1 trillion budget deficit tainted the credit quality of the world’s largest economy.
Bondholders questioned the timing of S&P’s move, with European Union leaders planning to meet Dec. 8-9 in Brussels to end a crisis that led to bailouts of Greece, Ireland and Portugal, and now threatens to engulf Italy. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy had presented a plan earlier in the day to rewrite the EU’s governing treaty to allow tighter economic cooperation.
“S&P should back off,” Anthony Valeri, a market strategist with LPL Financial in San Diego, which oversees $330 billion, said in a telephone interview yesterday. “It complicates the job of the EU leaders to resolve the debt problem.”
More
No comments:
Post a Comment