(Washington) The Biden administration cried injustice on Wednesday after Fitch’s decision to deprive the United States of its precious AAA, the rating agency explaining for its part that it was a consequence of the deterioration of governance, sending Republicans and Democrats back to back.
“Among the things that are important to us is the fact that governments on both sides, Republican and Democratic, have not been able to come up with lasting solutions to address growing fiscal issues,” Richard Francis, head of the Americas at Fitch Ratings.
“We have seen a fairly consistent deterioration in governance over the past few decades,” he insisted, highlighted in particular by “the constant tightrope resolution of the debt ceiling issue.”
A decision that however goes badly on the side of the American government, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, attached to the White House, Jared Bernstein, even calling it “bizarre, arbitrary, absurd and confusing”.
“The timing doesn’t make sense. The president (Biden, editor’s note) passed major measures supported by both parties, in particular the major climate plan (IRA, editor’s note) which not only solved the debt ceiling but made it possible to reduce 1,000 billion in dollars the deficit,” Mr. Bernstein detailed on CNBC.
The rating agency announced on Tuesday that it had downgraded the rating of long-term US debt from AAA to one notch below AA and associated it with a “stable” outlook, meaning that Fitch does not foresee any further deterioration in the short term.
Fitch is the second agency to downgrade the US rating, the previous action in the matter, by S
Only Moody’s still assigns, at this stage, the best credit rating to the debt of the world’s largest economy.
As of Tuesday evening, the White House had criticized the agency’s decision, saying that “it flies in the face of reality to degrade the United States at a time when President Biden has achieved the greatest recovery of all the major economies of the world,” according to its spokesperson, Karine Jean-Pierre.
