Moody’s Threatens to Downgrade U.S. Credit Rating!

HOCKER: Moody’s Threatens to Downgrade U.S. Credit Rating!

by Mike Larson

Dear Readers, At 9:00 this morning, Moody’s Investor Services announced that if Congress doesn’t get its act together — and soon — it will likely STRIP the U.S. of its sacrosanct “AAA” credit rating! Moody’s #1 worry? Why? Because the official U.S. government debt-to-GDP ratio is now about 103%: About HALF A TRILLION DOLLARS GREATER than the value of all the goods and services our entire economy produces. WORSE: It’s only an eyelash away from where Greece’s debt-to-GDP ratio was when the Euro crisis began! PLUS, Moody’s also expressed concerns about the very same crisis we’ve been warning you about for months — The Fiscal Cliff: Or as Moody’s calls it, the “large, immediate fiscal shock” that is now scheduled to strike the economy on January 1, 2013! Look: It’s no secret that the United States government — and by extension, the economy and the stock market — is in serious trouble. Standard & Poor’s already cut our AAA rating last summer. Moody’s and Fitch avoided doing so, saying that the automatic spending cuts and tax hikes associated with the debt ceiling legislation would likely help stabilize our debt and deficit levels. But instead, things have only gotten WORSE! Washington is on track to run yet ANOTHER $1 trillion-plus annual budget deficit this fiscal year ... Our official national debt load just topped a whopping $16 trillion, and ... We are now staring down the barrel at a mind blowing $222 TRILLION in total government debt and obligations — bills that cannot ... WILL not ... ever be paid! That means the risk of a massive fiscal crisis crashing down on our nation like a ton of bricks is rising fast. How bad could it be? Well, in 2011, the debt ceiling debate and associated ratings crisis drove the Dow Industrials down by 2,000 points in nearly two, short weeks! Plus, risky bond prices got slammed and the entire economy reeled. Now we’re facing a FAR GREATER crisis, and our craven politicians have wasted an entire year doing precisely NOTHING to head it off! If this isn’t a recipe for disaster, I don’t know what is!