Study finds bankers are a net economic drain, while hospital cleaners add positive value.

[Alby_da_Wolf]

Kasz216 said:

Alby_da_Wolf said:

Kasz216 said:

Also, you don't really get to choose your credit rating agencies.

The ones used rely largely on who has the most cred.

The only ones with any real cred are the American ones currently.

I mean honestly, if you were going to blame them for anything. It's for not downgrading Greece and Italy faster to spur debt controlling moves sooner... and that's only if you believe it matters.

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/12/do-ratings-agencies-still-matter/

Note US bonds not being effected by downgrades.

I don't see how making the dominant ratings agencies dependent on the governments they're supposed to be downgrading helps. If they would of held off on downgraded Italy and Greece, all that would of happened is that the situation would of been even worse when it did explode and people would be even more slow moving to fix it.

The problem hasn't been France and Germany getting preferable treatment. It's that France and Germany let the periphery act spend like drunken sailors with flimsy paperwork and more or less vindicate those who stayed out of it.

Yep, probably I didn't understand how central banks work.

About rating agencies, I don't want ones dependent on government, but let me be sceptical about the neutrality of S&P, Moody, etc, thanks to their rating, banks were allowed to get rid of the Argentinian bonds they owned suggesting and selling them to their clients when they were already waste paper. About big American banks, it's natural that they do their own interest, but I don't think they are neutral when they choose against which nation they'll launch a destructive speculative attack.

About Italy, it's by no means in the same situation of Greece, we are plagued by bureausaurs and politicians that don't want to give up their own privileges and those of the groups and lobbies that bring them votes, but we still have some of the richest and most productive regions in Europe, and most people now are fed up and want to get rid of the rot, and elections would have been a good opportunity, but curiously (suspiciously?) Italy's creditors pushed our president to try to form, after Berlusconi's resignation, a new "technical" government to avoid elections. Also, Germany and France don't want italy to sink, as it's EU 4th economy and they need us, also to gather from us more than 100 of the 700 billion Euros needed for the new fund for stability. Finally, Germany strongly wanted Italy and Spain in the past, and now the new Eastern European members, in the Eurozone, because despite all the horrible flaws in our government's management of economy, our old weak currency emptied our pockets (but Euro does it too), but helped us a lot to compete with them. BTW we are also plagued by strong tax evasion, and right now, starting since gambling was legalized until some tricks were exposed, the state accumulated a 98 billion Euros credit, three times the last financial bill, with authorized gambling companies that cheated on the controls to pay less taxes, but for some reasons the credit's collection doesn't proceed.

Depends on your definition of nuetral.  The major ratings agencies treat all the countries the same but they are cautious when downgraded, waiting too long because they trade soley on their reputation.  Any bias or a wrong call would kill them. 

So they end up being reactionary.

When they downgrade a country it's because that country is already beggining to collapse economically.

This can be seen by the fact that France STILL hasn't been downgraded, when it really should have...and the countries that HAVE been downgraded should of been downgraded a while ago.

As for having productive areas... you could be making 300,000 a year, but if your ranking up 360,000 a year in debt overtop the 300,000 your making... it doesn't matter.

About neutrality: the biggest rating agencies are private companies owned by big American groups, I can't see them sinking USA even if they were given the opportunity, as the disaster would risk destroying them too, while, besides being outside of America, it's easier to sink a EU country at a time, because our Union isn't a true, full Union like USA, not to mention that rescue attempts by the other EU countries are predictable, probably more than similar attempts made by USA to protect themselves, due to EU inflexible rules and stubborn will to keep official inflation low even when it's totally unrealistic, and a speculation can be made also exploiting them. Those same EU rules also limit the ways the attacked country can defend itself.

About productivity, the last financial bill written by Monti is almost all about new or increased taxes and very depressive, but in general Italian real life economy is bigger than our debt, but there's a lot of tax evasion and honest taxpayers bear the burden of too many useless costs: at parity of nominal tax pressure with many other states, our state gets its money from a number of taxes in the hundreds instead of in the tens like sensibly ruled countries, this has very bad side-effects, increased costs and loss of time for both state and taxpayers, and clogging tax offices with an abnormal mass of papers that steal precious time that could instead be used to dig out a lot more tax evaders. Up until now, no minister of Economy managed to simplify our tax system, there's a hidden cross-party lobby that always thwart every attempts (this happens also to every attempt to simplify our legal system in general, that's plagued too by an abnormal number of laws).