Credit Rating | featured news

Fitch Ratings warned on Thursday that it might downgrade the credit rating of China within two years and there was a greater than even chance of a downgrade of Japan's credit status.

Moody's Investors Service cut the rating on Japan's government debt by one notch to Aa3, its fourth-highest rating, blaming large budget deficits and the build-up of debt.

Standard & Poor's head of France said on Thursday that the agency was confident of maintaining France's AAA credit rating unchanged with a stable outlook.

Fitch Ratings said Tuesday it will keep its rating on U.S. debt at the highest grade, AAA, and issued a "stable" outlook, meaning it expects the rating to stay there.

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 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.

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."