In an article in Crain’s Chicago Business yesterday, columnist Greg Hinz has a headline reading “Moody’s tightens the screws on Illinois.”
Someday, I hope he writes an article headlined “Illinois tightens the screws on Moody’s.”
In his article yesterday, Hinz warns us about a recent report from “one of the big New York bond-rating agencies,” which threatened us with another downgrade absent resolution of the raging budget battle in Springfield.
Hinz helps to inform his readers about what Moody’s does, and why, with the sentence “Moody's job is to judge the likelihood that borrowers will get their money back with interest without delay or default, and the firm clearly has rising concerns that Illinois can continue to do that.”
It looks like our media continues to slavishly report what comes out of these credit rating “agencies” (paid by governments, for the “ratings”) as authorities, even after their contribution to the greatest financial and economic crisis since (at least) the Great Depression.