From the Financial Times Germany.... http://www.ftd.de/politik/europa/:u...u-will-laenderratings-verbieten/60118331.html I hope they do it quick cause my country is on the verge of a downgrade... Yeah, bring on European rating agencies!!!! And every Eurozone country is AAA. But the US is CCC.
I'm amazed by the stupidity of Barnier's suggestion. Basically you are not allowed to rate bad products. A priori, products without a rating are bad. He thinks investors are retards?
rating agencies are worthless, we live in a fiduciary currency world. there's no such thing as a debt crisis, just monetary policy dilemmas. it is pretty obvious that ECB and FED will keep monetizing their debt, so why the buzz?
No one is going to trust European rating agencies to rate Europe just as you shouldn't trust US rating agencies to rate the USA, Chinese agencies to rate China,etc So with that being said, most European countries except for maybe Germany, absolutely deserve to be downgraded. A lazy society for the last half century has been Europe's undoing, and the era of entitlements,freebies and holidays are over with much higher borrowing costs. As for the USA being CCC, the USA suffers from the same symptoms but a very much different cause. In the United States, greed not laziness is the issue, and greed is fundamentally a cyclical human EMOTION, eminently curable by doing absolutely nothing while laziness is a pervasive human condition which to rectify would take ages of inculcating its populace with a hard work ethic. Don't forget too that the USA subsidizes Europe's defense to such a large degree that it has become a ridiculous burden. I wonder what would happen if the United States breaks the NATO alliance, closes down all its bases, tell Putin they can do whatever they wish with Europe? Would the Netherlands,Italy,Belgium,etc be willing to divert massive resources from its healthcare system and entitlement programmes to build up a credible military force? So no, the USA is sure as hell not AAA but its way better than Europe.
The US pays for it's global stationed army under the pretence of protection for the following 3 reasons. 1: To make sure the USD remains accepted as the reserve currency. 2: To keep afloat one of it's last industries left, the arms manufacturing. 3: To keep 300 thousand soldiers and their families busy instead of them joining the army of unemployed at home. I'd say at this point in time the NATO alliance is probably more of a safety hazard then the notion of NATO being desolved would be given the US it's foreign policies across the globe and the disgruntlement is has created towards the US and it's allies. You don't see any Afghans or Paki's burning a EU flag right....
This has become quite an obsession of yours, without a day going by without a post of topic dedicated to this, what I suggest as a mark of your obsession is that you end every single post you make from here on out with: "They just lazy They just LAZY!!!"
I understand what you are saying, but I have never bought the fiat money (what I assume you mean by fiduciary currency world.) The world spends more paper money because there is more wealth. That wealth doesn't just come from shifting paper around, but by discovering more oil or other commodities, raising the education of the population, more services being offered cheaper, medical and other technological advances, etc. No question that printing money occurs and recently at an alarming rate, but in relation to GDP (which in turn somehow captures all of the wealth including "real value"), is what counts, imo. The gold standard is wrong because there simply isn't enough of it to represent the wealth of the world. The real wealth of a nation is the people that live in it. If they just added one more thing to the accounting, the overall satisfaction of a population and individuals in general, it would be close to being perfect.
That's not too far off. There are several more reasons to the ones that you mentioned, but those play a significant role.