The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: credit downgrade

Wall Street, Still Betting Against America

In another display of Wall Street morality, the Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether hedge funds made insider trades benefiting from Standard & Poor’s U.S. credit downgrade last month. According to the Wall Street Journal:

Securities regulators have sent subpoenas to hedge funds, specialized trading shops and other firms as they probe possible insider trading before the U.S. government’s long-term credit rating was cut last month, people familiar with the matter said.

Securities and Exchange Commission officials demanded more information about specific trades made shortly before Standard & Poor’s Corp. downgraded the U.S. to double-A-plus from triple-A on Aug. 5, these people said. SEC officials are zeroing in on firms that bet the stock market would tumble.

Those trades could have reaped huge profits when the Dow Jones Industrial Average sank 5.5% on Aug. 8, a 634.76-point decline in the first day of trading after S&P announced it yanked the government’s top-tier credit rating.

It isn’t clear which investment firms have received subpoenas, and an SEC spokesman declined to comment Monday. But the subpoenas are unusually broad, seeking information about why certain trades were made, according to a person familiar with the matter.

To win an insider-trading case related to the downgrade, SEC officials likely would need to show that an investor made trades as a direct result of a leak from officials at S&P or the Treasury Department who knew about the downgrade before it was announced.

The SEC has asked S&P which employees knew of the downgrade in advance. It isn’t technically illegal for rating firms to discuss their ratings and analysis with some groups, but the firms must have written policies preventing the misuse of information.

The investigation is not certain to produce results, but the news that Wall Street was still trying to profit from such an unfortunate situation — possibly through illegal means — is troubling in light of the anti-regulation majority on Capitol Hill.

Obama: U.S. Shouldn’t Let Its Credit Be Downgraded Because We Lack ‘AAA Political System To Match Our AAA Credit Rating’

Speaking from the White House around 10:30 this morning, the president insisted the nation work for a solution to avert default and steer clear of a predictable — and avoidable — crisis:

Right now, the House of Representatives is still trying to pass a bill that a majority of Republicans and Democrats in the Senate have already said they won’t vote for. It’s a plan that would force us to re-live this crisis in just a few short months, holding our economy captive to Washington politics once again. In other words, it does not solve the problem, and it has no chance of becoming law.

There are a lot of crises in the world that we can’t always predict or avoid -– hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, terrorist attacks. This isn’t one of those crises. The power to solve this is in our hands. And on a day when we’ve been reminded how fragile the economy already is, this is one burden we can lift ourselves. We can end it with a simple vote –- a vote that Democrats and Republicans have been taking for decades, a vote that the leaders in Congress have taken for decades.

He said we shouldn’t let our credit rating be downgraded simply because we “didn’t have a AAA political system to match our AAA credit rating.”

The president also repeated the Democratic talking point that failing to raise the debt ceiling — and thus allowing our credit to be downgraded — would “result potentially in tax increase on everyone in the form of higher interest rates on their mortgages, their car loans, their credit cards. And that’s inexcusable.”

Finally, he repeated Bill Clinton’s implication from his interview with us at The National Memo that the debt ceiling is simply the authority for the United States to “keep its word,” not new spending.

“It’s not a vote that allows Congress to spend more money. Raising the debt ceiling simply gives our country the ability to pay the bills that Congress has already racked up. I want to emphasize that. The debt ceiling does not determine how much more money we can spend, it simply authorizes us to pay the bills we already have racked up.”