81–90 of 242 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know, I'm not against people downvoting me, but I'd like to know why. I'd like people to tell me why they disagree so I can at least learn from my mistakes.
I didn't downvote you, but your comment isn't very relevant to the topic. I'm guessing that's why.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/sp-explains-why-2-trillion-err...
I hate it when students whine about the unfairness of their lousy grades and how they really deserved a higher one. It's even worse when the Treasury Department does it.
This isn't whining - the Treasury isn't simply complaining about the downgrade. They are pointing out a fact that the original justification for the downgrade was proved to be wrong, yet after realizing this S&P maintained the same conclusion based on a different set of justifications. This would be like a student pointing out that the teacher incorrectly graded his paper; and after acknowledging that fact, the teach…
Way back when I was a university undergrad, I got a 0 for a proof on a statistics exam, but the proof was correct. When I showed this to the professor, she agreed, but said it wasn't the proof she was "looking for", and so the 0 stayed. Maybe she's working for S&P now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I ended up going to summer school for physics because my teacher "unfairly" gave me an F. She told us at the beginning of the school year that we only had to do 10 of those honor questions (out of 20 possible) every unit and at the end of the year told us "Oh, I meant you only had to do 10 to not drop a letter grade" which was retarded and the class went nuts at this. And once, another student accidentally took home…
You know, I'm not against people downvoting me, but I'd like to know why. I'd like people to tell me why they disagree so I can at least learn from my mistakes.
There are lots of legitimate reasons to complain about teachers. You gave one legit (changing course requirements midway), and lots of illegitimate ones. You do not have a respectful tone.
Plus, the fact that you would have only gotten a D makes you look retarded in the eyes of most on HN. It's hard to get sympathy from an intellectually snobby group by bragging about your failure to excel.
In short, this is not how a polite student who deserved an A but received a B/C would have responded.
S&P's mistake is certainly incredibly embarrassing but apart from that I'm asking myself a much more fundamental question: Why is the ability to pay considered at all when it comes to the US? A country that is indebted in its own currency can theoretically never default on its nominal obligations. Not due to inability to pay at least. I don't think that credit rating agencies even try to pass judgement on the likelyh…
It was framed this way by some involved parties, but it's a second independent decision to let that happen.
The other option was for the Treasury to stop issuing checks at a rate higher than than it's inflows.
This is similar to what many of us might have done at some point (college might be one), riding as close to your limit as possible, but making minimum payments and reducing spending as needed.
I'm sure they have a playbook somewhere that sets priorities of payments. Actually defaulting on a tranche (does that term apply here?) of bonds would spike the rate so much, they'd avoid it for all but paying themselves, probably.
According to the CBO last week's budget agreement cuts $2.1-2.4T in spending [1]. S&P's guidance was that we cut $4T. So either the CBO is off as well, or this typical Washington budgetary spin. [1] http://cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=12357
My reading of the Treasury release is that this all has to do with"baselines". Compared to current spending the deal didn't make cuts at all--spending will continue to increase over the next 10 years. The "cuts" are compared to a projection of what would have been spent without the deal, called a baseline. There are various ways of calculating baseline, i.e. how you account for inflation.It seems that S&P's error was…
S&P's mistake is certainly incredibly embarrassing but apart from that I'm asking myself a much more fundamental question: Why is the ability to pay considered at all when it comes to the US? A country that is indebted in its own currency can theoretically never default on its nominal obligations. Not due to inability to pay at least. I don't think that credit rating agencies even try to pass judgement on the likelyh…
US internal debt to GDP ratio is 78%
US external debt to GDP ratio is 100%Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one was seriously suggesting that we never pay our debts ever again, There really was two things proposed: One was too not raise the debt ceiling and use SS and Medicare funds to pay off the debt; The other was to default but just for a short while so as to provide more pressure on the Democrats. If we defaulted for say a month; it would hurt a minuscule fraction of the debt holders. If it actually would hurt debt…
I believe that the US government has an obligation under current law to make payments to Medicare and SS recipients. It's not a voluntary donation. I don't think the government can simply stop making those payments tomorrow without violating current law. You see, it is this entire attitude of political parties negotiating in the 11th hour about whether or not to honor this or that obligation that isn't exactly encour…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"We can pay back our debt since it's denominated in dollars" is a meme thrown around online blogs, but it is misguided. If the way the debt is paid back is through currency devaluation, it's safe to say that the investors were not truly paid back--i.e. there was a loss of principal measured in purchasing power. So while it's true that the US can always pay back the full dollar amount of how much it owes, it's less tr…
That's exactly what I said. The keyword is "nominal obligations".
Perhaps I misunderstood your comment, but it read like "it doesn't matter because we can pay all debts."
I continue to be amazed at how much credibility we seem to give this (and other) rating agency after they rated subprime-backed derivatives as safe, rated AIG & Lehman as safe. Is our collective short-term memory non-existent?
An AAA rating should be conferred on an entity that is riskless. The recent debt debacle is very likely to be repeated in the near future. These are not the actions of a riskless entity.