A Look at Credit Ratings Around the World

As always, the Economist’s Daily Chart feature provides some interesting data to study, today’s offering being an interactive table of sovereign credit ratings by the big three agencies - S&P, Moody’s, and Fitch - for more than three dozen nations around the world. 

I’ve taken the liberty of inserting a little red line to delineate all-Tiple-A rated credit from something less than that, a line that the U.K. fell below last week when Moody’s downgraded British debt.

Based on the debt and budget data shown, both the U.S. and the U.K. belong below the line, not above it, and if we both didn’t have the ability to control our own currency and a long history of making good on our debt, we’d be much lower. Ouch! Look at those numbers for Japan, second from the bottom!