THERE IS an African proverb that says when two elephants fight, it is the grass that gets trampled. Right now, as  the world’s sole superpower, the United States of America is grappling with the enormous consequences of its worst debt- ceiling crisis, and has been reduced to creaming against the shock of Standard and Poor’s downgrading of its rating for the first time ever.
A senior spokesman for President Barack Obama’s administration was reported yesterday as angrily accusing S&P of inflating the US deficits by two trillion dollars in what he deemed “a facts-be-damned decision” to reduce the country’s stable triple-A currency rating to that of a now double-AA+ status.
Our little Caribbean region of vulnerable economies closely linked in trade and economic relations with the USA has been left to join the rest of the world in bewilderment over the global fiscal and economic repercussions of the ‘trampling’ taking place between a Washington administration and the internationally respected rating agency, Standard and Poor’s (S&P)
Yesterday, leading news media across Europe and North America were focussed on the implications of this startling development that dramatically followed the agonising political manoeuvres by President Obama’s administration, and a very divided US Congress, to avoid a last-minute default in a fiercely looming debt-ceiling crisis.
Coming as it did within four months of the official start of the US 2012 presidential campaign; it was no surprise that Obama’s more militant Republican opponents were quick to fire their salvos against him personally
For example, Mitt Romney, a former Governor of Massachusetts and a leading Republican contender for the 2012 presidential race, lost little time in summing up the thinking of his colleagues with the claim that S&P’s downgrading of America’s credit rating was “a deeply troubling indicator of our country’s decline under President Obama…”
Decline under Obama? Truth is, under both previous Republican and Democrat-led administrations, the USA had to frequently engage in negotiations to raise the Federal debt ceiling to avoid default in honouring payment obligations and maintaining its cherished triple-A rating.
This time, with Obama in the White House and seemingly geared for a successful second term, the Republicans in Congress, and particularly the new and more right-wing representatives, were out to frustrate and humble the President, even if it meant, as appeared at one tense period, voting against raising the debt ceiling. Such is the nature of the beast that is also ‘politics US-style.
However, there came a sharp rebuttal from the head of ‘sovereign ratings’ for S&P, John Chambers, who explained that while there was an error that had inflated the US deficits by $2 trillion, the reality was that “it doesn’t make a material difference… It doesn’t change the fact that the debt-to-GDP ratio will continue to rise over the next decade…”
And, he further stressed in an interview with CNN:  “…there is plenty of blame to go around … It’s a problem that has been a long time in the making, well over this administration and the prior administration…”
Guyana and the Caribbean region as a whole and the rest of the world would share a common hope for success in the arrangements put in place for a special 12-member bi-partisan congressional committee, to come forward with realistic proposals to help the USA overcome this dreaded Federal debt-ceiling challenge, that has led to the very vexing problem of a first-time drop in its traditional triple-A rating.