After all — as the Youtube clip below clearly points out – agency credit ratings are merely opinions and not meant to guide investment decisions….

NYTimes.com: Portugal’s Debt Rating Cut to Junk by Moody’s -

Moody’s Investors Service cut Portugal’s debt rating to junk status on Tuesday, ratcheting up the pressure on euro zone governments to work out a lasting solution to their financial woes.

Inside Job: Ratings Agencies

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This is just in from the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
A Review of Verizon and Google’s Net Neutrality Proposal
Legislative Analysis by Cindy Cohn

Efforts to protect net neutrality that involve government regulation have always faced one fundamental obstacle: the substantial danger that the regulators will cause more harm than good for the Internet. The worst case scenario would be that, in allowing the FCC to regulate the Internet, we open the door for big business, Hollywood and the indecency police to exert even more influence on the Net than they do now.

On Monday, Google and Verizon proposed a new legislative framework for net neutrality. Reaction to the proposal has been swift and, for the most part, highly critical. While we agree with many aspects of that criticism, we are interested in the framework’s attempt to grapple with the Trojan Horse problem. The proposed solution: a narrow grant of power to the FCC to enforce neutrality within carefully specified parameters. While this solution is not without its own substantial dangers, we think it deserves to be considered further if Congress decides to legislate.

Unfortunately, the same document that proposed this intriguing idea also included some really terrible ideas. It carves out exemptions from neutrality requirements for so-called “unlawful” content, for wireless services, and for very vaguely-defined “additional online services.” The definition of “reasonable network management” is also problematically vague. As many, many, many have already pointed out, these exemptions threaten to completely undermine the stated goal of neutrality.

read more…

Four Deformations of the Apocalypse
By DAVID STOCKMAN
Published: July 31, 2010

IF there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt — if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion. That’s a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase.

More fundamentally, Mr. McConnell’s stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy. Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts — in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses, too. But the new catechism, as practiced by Republican policymakers for decades now, has amounted to little more than money printing and deficit finance — vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes.

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Elizabeth Warren appears capable of well-reasoned discussions and responsiveness to opposing points of view. We need more examples of this at every level of public policy: county, state, national and international.

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Political Economy – GOP appointees to oversight panel praise Elizabeth Warren’s work
washingtonpost.com
By Brady Dennis

The pair praised Warren for conducting exhaustive investigations into the federal government’s rescue of firms such as American International Group and GMAC, even when those reviews produced results that didn’t always shine a glowing light on the Treasury Department.

“It is important to note that the panel has been critical of policies and decisions implemented by Democrats and Republicans alike,” wrote University of Kentucky economics Professor Kenneth Troske and J. Mark McWatters, a Dallas lawyer and certified public accountant, who serve on the five-member panel. “There is great virtue in that because, while it is easy to question the decisions made by members of the other political party, it takes courage to publicly question the decisions made by members of your own party.”

They added, “We often debate a wide variety of issues with Professor Warren and have found her quite willing to modify her views if presented with well-reasoned, cogent arguments.”

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One year ago, Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, bringing to a head the growing chaos on Wall Street.

In the days and weeks that followed Lehman’s September 15, 2008, collapse, credit markets would freeze, the stock market plunged, the government took a controlling interest in AIG, Wachovia and Merrill Lynch merged themselves out of existence, the Congress approved a plan to spend $700 billion to bail out Wall Street, the Federal Reserve innovated an array of programs involving trillions of dollars worth of support for Wall Street and the credit markets, and the national economy — and much of the global economy — declined precipitously.

As the crisis unfolded, it quickly became commonplace to suggest that nothing would ever be the same, on Wall Street or in the national economy. The Wall Street goliaths had been humbled — and many had gone out of business, via merger or bankruptcy. Deregulation went out of style and even former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan indicated that the conceptual underpinnings of his deregulatory approach had proven flawed.

One year later, it is clear that the conventional wisdom emerging as the crisis developed was wrong.

read more…