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The top credit rating is AAA, essentially implying zero risk to the lender, which the US lost this month and which the UK has managed, so far, to retain. Although each agency uses different codes to represent the slide down the ratings scale, the principle is the same - the lower the rating, the greater the risk and the more interest is likely to be demanded by the borrower to compensate for the increased chance they will not be repaid.

That all changed on 5 August, when S & P is a step was unthinkable until recently and robbed America of the AAA-rating. Enter into this psychologically damaging development is a milestone in the decline of U.S. global economic dominance, and it fed the panic that has driven stock markets around the world. Although the other two of the big three rating agencies have kept their gold-plated reviews on U.S. debt for now, watching both the situation closely, while a downgrade of this kind of even one of the agencies is a historic event.

The focus is now firmly on the rating agencies, with the U.S. government is trying to trash S & P 's analysis and Obama' s insistence that America is always a AAA nation. Politicians are particularly annoying because the billions of dollars the U.S. government has spent trying to stimulate the economy - and falling taxes and rising utility bills resulting from the recession - \ are largely responsible for driving the country's debt to the point at which S & P downgrade as necessary.

In other words, believe the opponents of the rating agencies of the U.S. government will rescue the economy from a problem for them to punish the three largely responsible, because their failure on the dangers of toxic subprime mortgages, which highlight the trigger for the recession. As Paul Krugman, the Nobel prize winner economist, said in the New York Times last week. "It 's difficult for someone less qualified and pass a verdict on America as the rating agencies think the people who sub-prime-backed rated securities are now declared that they are the judges of fiscal policy? Really? ".

That the rating agencies, the difficulties embedded in clouds of toxic debt Spot is not soon enough no doubt. But they are not alone in the investment industry, which turned a blind eye to a massive and it failed to ask the right questions. Likewise, they are not alone in identifying that the U.S. in debt far above his head as whether the Obama administration wants to or not.

Some critics have pointed out that indicated a potential for conflicts of interest when agencies evaluate non-governmental issuers of debt securities, because they are paid by those who judge them, - a subject on the agenda of U.S. legislators on the ratings to . improve There are no incentives for sovereign ratings, which are provided free of charge to the country.