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Moody’s: Unpleasant Comments On US Debt

Moody’s made comments on the sovereign paper of the UK, UK, Germany, and France. Each of these nations has a Aaa rating currently. The assessment of each was harsh but the US was singled out in particular: For the four…

By Douglas A. McIntyre
Published January 13, 2011, 8:36am ET · 1 min read

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Moody’s made comments on the sovereign paper of the UK, UK, Germany, and France. Each of these nations has a Aaa rating currently.

The assessment of each was harsh but the US was singled out in particular:

For the four largest Aaa countries — France, Germany, the UK and the US — these paths show little change from those analyzed by Moody’s last August. Looking beyond the near-term evolution of their credit metrics, Moody’s emphasizes that all four countries face dramatic increases under their existing policy commitments arising from ageing-related pension and healthcare subsidies. These future costs must be brought under control if these countries are to maintain long-term stability in their debt burden credit metrics.

The political consequences are such that Congress is unlikely to do anything, even if the US eventually loses it Aaa rating. No one dares suggest changes in the basic structure of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Douglas A. McIntyre

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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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