Signs Of The Apocalypse: Fitch Downgrades Spain

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Just in time for the US three-day Memorial Day weekend, Fitch has downgraded Spain’s long-term foreign and local currency issuer default ratings to AA+ from AAA.  The news wrecked the American market pushing down stocks 1.1% in light afternoon trading.

The Spanish government recently released data the it would miss its GDP forecasts. It said gross domestic product would rise 2.5% in 2011 compared to a previous estimate of 2.9% The nation said unemployment in 2011 would be 18.9% against 20% this year. It forecasts that the jobless rate will still be as high as 16.3% in 2013. The news caused the euro to sell down to $1.229.

The Spanish parliament passed new austerity measures by a small margin and there is still a strong possibility that the civil unrest likely to be caused by high taxes and wage cuts will cause significant enough unrest to undermine an already badly damage economy.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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