Standard & Poor's, U.s. Credit Rating Downgrade | featured news

Standard & Poor's president Deven Sharma steps down just weeks after the agency downgraded the US credit rating.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has asked rating agency Standard & Poor's (S&P) to disclose which employees knew of its decision to downgrade U.S. debt before it was announced last week, the Financial Times said, citing people familiar with the matter.

Standard & Poor's, whose unprecedented downgrade of U.S. debt triggered a worldwide stocks sell-off, is pushing back against a U.S. government proposal that would require credit raters to disclose "significant errors" in how they calculate their ratings.

China and other governments have little choice but to keep buying U.S. Treasury debt to store swelling foreign reserves even after Washington’s credit rating was cut by Standard & Poor’s.

The sell-off comes in reaction to the downgrade on U.S. debt by Standard & Poor's. Accelerating fears of a new global recession sent the Dow Jones industrial average plunging more than 600 points as Washington policymakers scrambled to contain the damage fueled by reaction to the U.S. credit rating downgrade.

The downgrading of U.S. government bonds by Standard & Poor’s ensures that the 2012 election will be fought on the battlefield of debt, as Electoral College math begins mingling with dire economic figures.

Wall Street stocks plummeted Monday morning on the first-ever downgrade of the United States' credit rating, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunging as much as 380 points in the first hour of trading.

France and Britain are most vulnerable within Europe to a rating review following the U.S. downgrade, with anemic growth and hefty borrowing placing them among the shakiest of the world's triple-A rated lenders.

Former White House adviser David Axelrod on Sunday pinned responsibility for the recent U.S. economic downgrade on the Tea Party movement, arguing that the group's political "brinkmanship" during debt ceiling negotiations "brought us to the brink of a default" -- and that, subsequently, "this is essentially a Tea Party downgrade."