The Wire

On Tuesday this week president Barack Obama struck a deal which raised the US debt ceiling – it was a near miss for the US economy – without Obama’s temporary solution The US would have defaulted and had its triple A rating downgraded. But what is a country like the United States doing with a triple A rating anyway ? Greece and other EU countries have been humiliated by being reduced to junk status but the US , with over 14 trillion dollars of debt, still has the gold standard How much do we know about the companies, like Moody’s and Standard and poor, that do the rating.