City analyst Jeremy Batstone-Carr, chief strategist at Charles Stanley stockbrokers, said: ‘If 2008 was the dawn of the financial ice-age, then 2011 is the financial Black Death. There is more than a whiff of the 1930s about this.’

ho hum ...

Oh, joy. People jumping out of buildings, and an American Fascist state rising, fuelled by extreme right-wing Christianity.

Brace yourselves, people

Officials in Washington told US media that the agency's sums were deeply flawed.

Unnamed sources were quoted as saying that a treasury official had spotted a $2 trillion [£1.2 trillion] mistake in the agency's analysis.

Treasury yields average about 0.70 percentage point less than the rest of the world’s sovereign debt markets, Bank of America Merrill Lynch indexes show. The difference has expanded from 0.15 percentage point in January.

“Yields are low in the face of a downgrade because there is nowhere else for people to go if they don’t buy Treasuries because they want to be in safe dollar assets,” Carl Lantz, head of interest-rate strategy at Credit Suisse Group AG, one of 20 primary dealers that trade directly with the Fed, said before the announcement.

I wonder how far away we are from the etch-a-sketch solution to the global economy (i.e. shake it up to reset everything and redo from start).
Obviously it's not going to happen but I wonder if someone with actual influence is going to suggest it (or be forced into suggesting it but some Tea Party type nutter).