S&P's move "doesn't change anything about the risk of U.S. Treasuries," Peter Fisher, New York-based BlackRock's head of fixed income and a former undersecretary of the U.S. Treasury Department, said in a Bloomberg Television interview.

Credit-default swaps that protect against default on U.S. notes for five years fell 11 percent last week to 55.4 basis points, CMA data show. That compares with an increase of 16 percent to 74.2 for swaps linked to Germany, an 18 percent climb to 143.8 for France, and a 4.5 percent increase to 77 for U.K. government securities. S&P rates those countries AAA.

Economists said S&P erred by basing its decision on politics instead of sticking to the assessment of the nation's finances.

"They think they're giving an honest appraisal but they have instead become hopelessly entangled in the politics of the national debt," Chris Rupkey, the chief financial economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd. in New York, said in a Bloomberg Television interview on Aug. 5. "The U.S. is not out of money, it has the financial resources to make good on its debt, and it should not have been downgraded."


'Basic Math'

John Bellows, the Treasury's acting assistant secretary for economic policy, said in a blog post that S&P initially overestimated future deficits by $2 trillion over 10 years.

"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," he wrote.

S&P said in a statement that the revision lowered its forecast for the debt-to-gross domestic product ratio in 2015 by two percentage points and didn't affect its ratings decision. S&P said in the Aug. 5 report that the ratio of debt to GDP would reach 77 percent in 2015 and 78 percent by 2021.


S&P Scrutiny

In 2009, when S&P reaffirmed the U.S.'s AAA rating, analysts led by Nikola Swann wrote that the ratio would approach 90 percent by 2013.

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