The Swiss are sulking, and who can blame them?
Standard & Poor, the ratings firm which happily labelled some of the biggest turkeys in the history of the solar system as perfectly safe investments, is thinking of downgrading the credit rating on the Union Bank of Switzerland, despite the massive support poured into it on Thursday by the Swiss government and the US Federal Reserve.
http://www.anorak.co.uk/forums/topic.php?id=2003
And just what did UBS do to endanger its reputation? It bought the tanking turkeys which Standard & Poor, along with other rating firms, had asserted were perfectly safe investments. So far, USB has lost around $48.6 billion in credit losses and writedowns on those perfectly safe investments.
The ratings firms are, of course, in the long line of people being investigated by regulatory authorities interested in discovering why a market, hailed by Alan Greenspan as having reduced risk so far that it was almost non-existent, could have resulted in the greatest financial disaster since the Great Depression.
So Standard & Poor, in their zeal to convince the world that it's not their fault, honest, guv, and it was just a total coincidence that they were paid far more to approve complicated packages than traditional ones, are now doing their bit to destabilise the situation still further. If I were the Swiss I wouldn't just be sulking; I'd send in the Navy...