BUT WHO ARE THESE DUDES? – AT 11:37 A.M. ET:  Now that "downgrade" is the word of the year, maybe we should introduce readers to the guys who made it so.  From the New York Post:

The Wall Street bean counter who trashed America's global credit reputation is a New Yorker who never studied economics, majored in literature and philosophy, and has a master's in English lit.

Yet John Chambers, 55, who lives with his wife, daughter and two dogs on Riverside Drive, has became the stern public face of Standard & Poor's, the private agency that wreaked havoc Friday night by notching down the nation's credit to double-A from triple-A.

David Beers, S&P's global head of sovereign ratings, Toronto analyst Nikola Swann and Chambers are the downgraders-in-chief who lowered the boom.

Now the trio is the focus of increasing scrutiny.

As economist and money manager Zachary Karabell said last month, their subjective decisions make them "emperors" wearing "very frayed robes."

Chambers grew up outside Kansas City, Kan., and went to liberal Grinnell College in Iowa, where he was a star on the swim team, ranking eighth in school history in the 1,000-meter freestyle.

After graduating in 1977 with a bachelor of arts in literature and philosophy, he went Ivy League, enrolling at Columbia University, where he got a master's degree in English literature.

Yikes.  The Columbia English Department is famous for contentiousness and pettiness.  There was a period, for years, when it couldn't hire professors because no one could agree. 

David Wargin, an S&P spokesman, told The Post that Chambers, a chartered financial analyst, chairs the agency's sovereign-rating committee, made up of "senior sovereign analysts" with various backgrounds.

But Wargin wouldn't say whether the committee was in disagreement over the US downgrade, Chambers declined to be interviewed for this story, and his wife backed her man, telling The Post, "I go on the wisdom of the people involved, including my husband."

Gulp.

Oddly, S&P's US downgrade was a departure from its rivals -- both of whom reaffirmed the triple-A rating last week when President Obama inked the debt-ceiling increase into law.

And...

Warren Buffett, for one, thinks S&P got it wrong. The United States, the billionaire investor yesterday told Bloomberg TV, merits a "quadruple-A" rating. The Oracle of Omaha also predicted that the nation would avoid another recession.

COMMENT:  We hope he's right, but it wouldn't hurt to change presidents next year. 

August 7, 2011