Have you noticed the “Republicans” can’t seem to cut a single dollar from the budget? The whole DOGE thing was smoke and mirrors. The current budget proposal would add another $10T to the debt over the next four years. Quite the Big Beautiful Bill, isn’t it? Good for Moody’s. Drop the bomb and see if it shakes any sense into them. -nvp
Moody’s downgrades United States credit rating, citing growth in government debt
Moody’s Ratings cut the United States’ sovereign credit rating down one notch to Aa1 from Aaa, the highest possible, citing the growing burden of financing the federal government’s budget deficit and the rising cost of rolling over existing debt amid high interest rates.
“This one-notch downgrade on our 21-notch rating scale reflects the increase over more than a decade in government debt and interest payment ratios to levels that are significantly higher than similarly rated sovereigns,” the rating agency said in a statement.
The decision to lower the United States credit profile would be expected, at the margin, to lift the yield that investors demand in order to buy U.S. Treasury debt to reflect more risk, and could dampen sentiment toward owning U.S. assets, including stocks. That said, all the major credit rating agencies continue to give the United States their second-highest available rating.
The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note climbed 3 basis points in after-hours trading, trading at 4.48%. The iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF — a proxy for longer term debt prices — fell about 1% in after hours trading, while the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust that tracks the benchmark index for U.S. stocks dropped 0.4%.
Moody’s had been a holdout in keeping U.S. sovereign debt at the highest credit rating possible, and brings the 116-year-old agency into line with its rivals. Standard & Poor’s downgraded the U.S. to AA+ from AAA in August 2011, and Fitch Ratings also cut the U.S. rating to AA+ from AAA, in August 2023.
“Successive U.S. administrations and Congress have failed to agree on measures to reverse the trend of large annual fiscal deficits and growing interest costs,” Moody’s analysts said in a statement. “We do not believe that material multi-year reductions in mandatory spending and deficits will result from current fiscal proposals under consideration.”
Downgrade of U.S debt happened several years ago with S&P, and they got some sort of retaliation by the government. I forget what.
I think it was Obama-era. U.S. finances were already visibly bad in 2009-16. It’s amazing they’ve kicked the can down the road this long, with distraction after distraction so people won’t talk about it. I never thought they could go this long.
I’d almost say this debt thing will crush Trump, except with him, you never know what is merely an op to create his next “crisi-tunity” (Homer Simpson expression) to solve something that you didn’t think could be solved.
Oh sorry, the above is Jeff 0.
It felt obvious that the pulling of USAID and other DOGE findings were naturally going to be reinvested elsewhere. The silver lining being that it wasn’t going to leftist causes anymore. But where is it going? Neocon causes?
It’s all a farce anyhow. What is a dollar? It’s a piece of fiction. The constitution says no state may require anything but gold and silver coin for payment of debt, yet here we are with this fiat currency that has no actual value and there are almost zero consequences for inflating it. Aaa to Aa1. It means nothing. They’ll still continue to borrow money at a rate that could never possibly be paid back in a million lifetimes.
Add to this the practical possibility that the US has now been effectively conquered and overthrown by it’s judges.
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2025/05/18/the-united-states-of-america-as-we-have-known-it-has-been-destroyed-by-the-us-supreme-court/