Posts tagged ‘Inside Job’

WTF S&P? Shock Doctrine? Inside Job? Both?

by , posted on Monday, August 8th, 2011 at 12:48 pm

So today S&P downgraded the credit ratings of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the mortgage giants which were taken over by the feds in 2008 after the mortgage disaster/scandal/swindling-of-American-homeowners-and-investors in which S&P was a co-conspirator. I realize some people are going to have a big problem with me describing S&P as a “co-conspirator” but hey, facts are facts: look it up.

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The Mediocre, The Bad, and The Ugly

by , posted on Friday, August 5th, 2011 at 9:00 pm

So this morning’s job report was better than expected, with the economy adding 117,000 jobs. So that’s good, right? Well, not really. More like mediocre. Among other things, we get to write off people who are so discouraged they just stopped looking, meaning there were actually less people working in July than in June. So that’s the mediocre.

The Bad is the downgrading of the country’s credit rating, courtesy of S&P. As a coworker of mine noted last week, when this was only a possibility, “If you’ve seen the movie Inside Job you’d kind of have to take any rating coming out of S&P with a grain of salt – okay maybe a truckload of salt – becuase how did those people put it when they were in the Congressional hearings? They said something like ‘It’s not like those ratings mean anything, it’s more like’…what’s the word I’m looking for here?”

“You mean ‘It’s more like they’re guidelines?'” I asked”

“Exactly!” she said. “Like Pirates of the Caribbean, which is fitting, since they are real, live 21st Century Pirates.”

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