“Thanks For The Downgrade: You Should All Be Fired.

[Serpo]

hahaha

Published: 10 August, 2011, 20:37

http://rt.com/files/usa/news/wall-street-airplane-banner/wall-street-airplane-banner.n.jpg

(Photo from http://www.democraticunderground.com)



Are you fed up with the government enough to spend $900 to hilariously make your point? A Missouri woman sure was, and now all of New York knows just how irked she is.
Lucy Nobbe of St Louis, Missouri became so sick of the debt discussions marring US politics as of late that she spent a substantial chunk of change to charter a plane to fly over Wall Street on Tuesday brandishing a banner. The 51-year-old banker approached a New York-based company, flysigns.com, and asked if they would assist her in an unusual request: she wanted the plane to zip over Manhattan with a message in tow reading “Thanks For The Downgrade: You Should All Be Fired.”
Nobbe tells KSDK News that she was so angry over the way that politicians have postured over the debt ceiling debate that she decided on Sunday morning that she needed to do something about it.
“I couldn't believe this happened because they were acting silly and being irresponsible,” she says. “I thought that is something that I could do that wouldn't cost a million dollars and maybe someone would listen to me.” Nobbe approached flysigns.com with her idea, and says that the company was all for it and even offered her a discount.
Nobbe adds she normally isn’t so vocal about politics but wanted to show her daughters, ages 11 and 15, that some things are worth standing up for.
“She definitely stands up, she is different than other moms, she stands up and I'm really proud of her. I am glad to have a mom like that,” says her younger daughter, Holly.
Nobbe tells KSDK that she originally wanted the message to be waved over Washington DC, but when she found out that aircraft are prohibited from flying over the nation’s capital, she figured Wall Street would suffice.
As luck would have it, her stunt ended up with the plan soaring just by the Standard & Poor’s headquarters, only days after they downgraded the US credit rating from triple-A to AA+.

http://rt.com/usa/news/wall-street-airplane-banner/

[mightymanx]

And onto the watch list she goes.

[Serpo]

And onto the watch list she goes.


But worth it

[osoab]

I was just reading somewhere that NBC nightly news or MSNBC ran with this story and slanted it to say she was just pissed at S&P. They left out her part of the interview where she called out Wall Street as a whole.

[Golden]

She used their credit for that, ahahahaaahaahaaaa!
Too bad she hadn't a more poignant statement prepared for media.
All praise the money hole!

[keehah]

And onto the watch list she goes.

It was even worse for S&P and its parent company McGraw Hill Financial

reuters.com: S&P calls U.S. lawsuit retaliation for stripping 'AAA' rating (https://www.reuters.com/article/mcgrawhill-sandp-lawsuit-idUSL2N0GZ1H620130903)

SEPTEMBER 3, 2013
Standard & Poor’s on Tuesday blasted a $5 billion fraud lawsuit by the U.S. government as retaliation for its 2011 decision to strip the country of its “AAA” credit rating.

The McGraw Hill Financial Inc unit was the only major credit rating agency to take away the United States’ top rating, and the only one sued by the U.S. Department of Justice for allegedly misleading banks and credit unions about the credibility of its ratings prior to the 2008 financial crisis.

In a filing with the U.S. District Court in Santa Ana, California, S&P said the lawsuit attempts to punish it for exercising its First Amendment free speech rights under the U.S. Constitution, but also seeks “excessive fines” in violation of the Eighth Amendment.

It said the government’s “impermissibly selective, punitive and meritless” lawsuit was brought “in retaliation for defendants’ exercise of their free speech rights with respect to the creditworthiness of the United States of America.”

S&P seeks to dismiss the lawsuit with prejudice, meaning it cannot be brought again. The August 2011 downgrade of the U.S. credit rating to “AA-plus” from “AAA” reflected concern about Washington’s ability to address the nation’s swelling debt.

A Justice Department spokesman declined immediate comment.

The Feb. 4 lawsuit accused S&P of inflating ratings to win more fees from issuers, and failing to downgrade ratings for collateralized debt obligations despite knowing they were backed by deteriorating residential mortgage-backed securities.

U.S. District Judge David Carter in July allowed the case to go forward.

In Tuesday’s filing, S&P estimated that more than $4.6 billion of the alleged losses may have resulted from CDOs that were structured, marketed or sold by Bank of America Corp or Citigroup Inc. It also said more than $1 billion came from debt that was never issued in the first place.

S&P also said the government lacked authority to sue under the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act of 1989, because no federally insured financial institutions were affected by violations...

S&P has said its own statements about the independence and objectivity of its ratings were “puffery” that could not be taken at face value or be the basis for a fraud lawsuit.

It is separately trying to dismiss similar lawsuits by 15 U.S. states now pending in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan. The states want these cases moved to state courts.

The case is U.S. v. McGraw-Hill Cos et al, U.S. District Court, Central District of California, No. 13-00779.
cbsnews.com: S&P settles government allegations for about $1.38B (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/s-p-settles-government-allegations-for-about-1-38b/)

FEBRUARY 3, 2015
S&P's parent company, McGraw Hill Financial (MHFI), announced the deal with the Department of Justice on Monday before financial markets opened in the U.S. The settlement, which covers ratings issued from 2004 through 2007, also resolves lawsuits filed by the attorneys general of 19 states and the District of Columbia.

Attorney General Eric Holder is scheduled to announce the settlement later this morning.

The credit rating agency's agreement represents one of the government's key efforts to hold accountable market players deemed responsible for contributing to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The settlement announced Tuesday came after months of negotiations.

The Justice Department filed civil fraud charges against S&P two years ago this week. It accused the company of failing to warn investors that the housing market was collapsing in 2006 because doing so would hurt its ratings business.

foxnews.com: Federal debt explodes by $1 trillion in five weeks since deal suspending limit became law (https://www.foxnews.com/politics/national-debt-explodes-higher-biden-signs-debt-ceiling-deal)
July 10, 2023

reuters.com: Fitch cuts US credit rating to AA+; Treasury calls it 'arbitrary' (https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/fitch-cuts-us-governments-aaa-credit-rating-by-one-notch-2023-08-01/)
August 2, 2023
nytimes.com: White House, Protecting Biden’s Economic Message, Hits Back on Credit Downgrade (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/03/us/politics/biden-fitch-credit-downgrade-recession.html)

Aug. 3, 2023
When the Fitch Ratings agency announced this week that it was downgrading its long-term credit rating (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/01/business/fitch-downgrade-us-credit-rating.html) of the United States from AAA to AA+, Biden administration officials were ready — and angry.

Administration officials had been lobbying Fitch against the downgrade, which bewildered many economists but became immediate fodder for congressional Republicans and nonpartisan budget hawks to criticize the nation’s current fiscal direction.

When the ratings agency went through with the move anyway, President Biden’s team mobilized a rapid response, with economic heavyweights inside and outside the administration criticizing the timing and substance of the announcement.

The swift pushback was an effort to keep the downgrade from tarnishing Mr. Biden’s economic record amid a run of good news in key measures of the health of the American economy. And its aggressiveness reflected the critical importance of an improving economic outlook to Mr. Biden’s re-election campaign.

“What was important to the president was to point out not only was the Fitch decision arbitrary and outdated, but his administration has taken action to accomplish things that go in the exact opposite of the markdown,” Jared Bernstein, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said in an interview, citing a bipartisan deal to raise the debt limit and modestly reduce federal spending.