## The Rating Agency Clown Show

S&P claims that their $2 trillion baseline error is "not material." John Belliows watches them put on their rubber noses and throw the custard pies at each other: In a document provided to Treasury on Friday afternoon, Standard and Poor’s (S&P) presented a judgment about the credit rating of the U.S. that was based on a$2 trillion mistake. After Treasury pointed out this error – a basic math error of significant consequence – S&P still chose to proceed with their flawed judgment by simply changing their principal rationale for their credit rating decision from an economic one to a political one.

S&P has said their decision to downgrade the U.S. was based in part on the fact that the Budget Control Act, which will reduce projected deficits by more than $2 trillion over the next 10 years, fell short of their$4 trillion expectation for deficit reduction. Clearly, in that context, S&P considers a $2 trillion change to projected deficits to be very significant. Yet, although S&P’s math error understated the deficit reduction in the Budget Control Act by$2 trillion, they found this same sum insignificant in this instance.

In fact, S&P’s $2 trillion mistake led to a very misleading picture of debt sustainability – the foundation for their initial judgment. This mistake undermined the economic justification for S&P’s credit rating decision. Yet after acknowledging their mistake, S&P simply removed a prominent discussion of the economic justification from their document. In their initial, incorrect estimates, S&P projected that the debt as a share of GDP would rise rapidly through the middle of the decade, and they cited this as a primary reason for a downgrade. In S&P’s corrected estimates – which lowered S&P’s projection of future deficits by$2 trillion over 10 years and lowered S&P’s estimate of debt as a share of GDP in 2021 by 8 percentage points - public debt is much more stable.

The error came about because S&P took the amount of deficit reduction CBO calculated from the Budget Control Act and applied it to the wrong starting point, or “baseline.”...