{"id":193561,"date":"2008-12-06T19:14:00","date_gmt":"2008-12-07T00:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/12\/06\/fundamentally-corrupt\/"},"modified":"2008-12-06T19:14:00","modified_gmt":"2008-12-07T00:14:00","slug":"fundamentally-corrupt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/12\/06\/fundamentally-corrupt\/","title":{"rendered":"Fundamentally Corrupt"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well, some good news for municipalities, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/apps\/news?pid=20601109&amp;sid=az..0LyBrxhg&amp;refer=home\">Stnadard and Poors (S&amp;P) has upgraded their debt significantly<\/a>, which should lower their borrowing costs.<\/p>\n<p>This is not a recognition of economic changes, after there is <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">no one<\/span> who is safer to loan to than they were a year ago, and the municipalities in question have seen the basic metric of credit worthiness, things like &#8220;unreserved general fund balance&#8221; and &#8220;debt per capita&#8221; have actually headed in the <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">wrong<\/span> direction.<\/p>\n<p>What has happened is two things:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The monoliner insurance companies who used to rent their credit ratings to municipalities, at taxpayer expense, are effectively defunct.<\/li>\n<li>People have noticed that government bonds have been routinely rated lower than commercial ones based on the same criteria, and are looking at investigations and\/or regulations of the ratings agencies.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>What has been going on for years is that the ratings agencies have systematically underrated state and municipal debt, because it&#8217;s how their buddies with the monoliner insurers got business.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s why I suggest that the current financial system may need to be amputated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well, some good news for municipalities, Stnadard and Poors (S&amp;P) has upgraded their debt significantly, which should lower their borrowing costs. This is not a recognition of economic changes, after there is no one who is safer to loan to than they were a year ago, and the municipalities in question have seen the basic &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,1004,1045],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-finance","category-insurance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193561"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193561\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}