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Comment by mbreese | Hacker News Reader

Some institutions are obligated (by charter or contract) to only buy AAA rated bonds. That's why it's a big deal... Now that being said, I have no idea how this would work in practice.

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Ratings are a factor in financial-industry regulations and in internal policies at financial institutions. But almost all of these regulations and policies treat a AAA rating the same as a AA rating. So a downgrade from AAA to AA would trigger little or no forced selling, Arora said. An official at Vanguard, the big mutual fund company, told me this week that "a downgrade from AAA would not trigger any events inside our funds."

From Planet Money's blog, http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/07/27/138738198/3-reason...

The full podcast, "Would a downgrade matter?", is an excellent listen: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/07/28/138721364/the-tues...

I'm sorry but that's bull. Anything can be changed. Contracts can be revised and even charters can be updated by a Board of Directors. If you hold a significant amount of U.S. Bonds you aren't going to ditch them on S&P's say so. You're going to call a meeting of the Board of Directors or Trustees or whoever and decide based on your own judgement.

The whole point of a rating agency is to provide you with research that you couldn't get based on your available resources. But every economist in the world is a resource on the U.S. Government's viability. You can turn on CNBC and get 24 hour coverage of it.

So the U.S. is a special case and the ratings agencies don't mean all that much in regards to it.

You are assuming that enough people have an actual interest in letting the U.S. remain in the position it is now or that a recession in the U.S. will affect the rest of the world enough to matter.

While that may have been true a couple of years or may be even months ago, I'd say that this is anything but certain. There are a lot of people and government through out the world who would like to see the U.S. weakened.

There is a lot of hope in your post. Investors will just move money to another country and there are enough who have much better grow rates. (China / India). Or entities who will bet on the downfall of the U.S and there will be countries who have a high interest in this.

On Monday you can short every major company the downfall will be significant. This will be very interesting to watch the next world recession is on our doorsteps.

Money does not care who you are or what you do.

Well, you might be surprised. Japan's market rallied 3% the day after their downgrade.

That's probably because the market thought they hit rock bottom. Markets like uncertainty less than bad news, so they are much happier knowing about the downgrade.

p.s. To your earlier point, the '40 ACT details investment requirements for Money Market Funds [can't think of them now, but you are right, there are numerous statutory requirements related to the grade of security certain bodies may invest in]:

http://taft.law.uc.edu/CCL/InvCoRls/rule2a-7.html

Those don't come into play because Moody's and Fitch maintained their AAA ratings for US treasuries.

Now that being said, I have no idea how this would work in practice.

That's the problem. No one else knows either. Monday is not going to be a good day.

Flux happens.

People mention that a lot, but what specific institutions have that requirement? And haven't they developed some more coherent requirements ever since subprime mortgage bonds proved the system could be gamed?

One example that comes to my mind is that Indian IPOs can be subscribed by foreign institutional investors using AAA bonds (they just show this as backing instead of paying the full price in cash before getting any shares allocated). I think now investors can only use the bonds of others countries.

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