Fitch Ratings downgraded US long-term debt late on Tuesday from AAA to AA+, citing this spring’s debt ceiling standoff as a major reason.
That’s a huge blow to the US. The global financial system relies on the promise that the US government will always pay back its debts. That trust makes the US dollar the most widely held currency worldwide. This downgrade threatens to complicate that.
Still, US markets barely reacted to the news in after-hours trading on Tuesday, and US Treasuries were holding steady.
But that doesn’t mean they won’t react, eventually. US stock futures were pointing to a weaker open Wednesday, and global markets stumbled overnight.
Past performance is no guarantee of future results, but a look back at market history can give us an idea of what might happen.
In the midst of the very tense debt ceiling standoff of 2011, Standard and Poor’s downgraded US debt for the first time in history.
That downgrade happened on a Friday afternoon, so investors had a weekend to think about their next move.
It didn’t help.
On the first trading day after the downgrade the S&P 500 plummeted by 6.5%. Markets experienced their most volatile week since the global financial meltdown in 2008, and it took another six months for stocks to climb back up to their previous highs.
Still, this time could be different. Investors know this devil — they’ve been through it before, and they saw that the downgrade didn’t actually raise US borrowing costs significantly or hurt Treasury markets. US Treasuries actually rose as investors barreled out of stocks.
“My sense is that the Fitch downgrade of the US credit rating is an insignificant development and will not move financial markets or the economy,” said Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM US. “As long as the Federal Reserve continues to treat US issued paper as AAA rated credit so will financial market participants.”
A little bit more: This May, Fitch agency put the country’s perfect AAA rating on watch as the debt ceiling fight raged on. During that time, lawmakers in Congress were engaged in a bitter dispute over raising the debt limit to keep the federal government from defaulting on its financial obligations. The deal was ultimately signed on June 2, just three days before the US Treasury said the US could run out of money to pay its bills.
“In Fitch’s view, there has been a steady deterioration in standards of governance over the last 20 years, including on fiscal and debt matters, notwithstanding the June bipartisan agreement to suspend the debt limit until January 2025,” Fitch said of the downgrade.
The downgrade, said Fitch, reflected the “expected fiscal deterioration” of the country over the next three years. The rating agency cited the “high and growing” government debt, which currently stands at more than $32 trillion (that’s just under $100,000 for every single person in America).
Former US Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers, called the decision bizarre. “The United States faces serious long-run fiscal challenges. But the decision of a credit rating agency today, as the economy looks stronger than expected, to downgrade the United States is bizarre and inept,” he said on Twitter, now formally known as X.
The current US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Tuesday said that the timing of the downgrade felt off.
“I strongly disagree with Fitch Ratings’ decision,” said Yellen. “The change by Fitch Ratings announced today is arbitrary and based on outdated data.”
