“Everybody who reads the newspaper knows that the United States has a very serious long-term fiscal problem.”
That wasn’t a quote by some financial talking head in the aftermath of Fitch’s downgrade of America’s credit rating on Tuesday. It was a reaction by then Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke the last time a major rating agency took that action back in August 2011. Investors could google hundreds of such warnings over the decades and conclude that the hand-wringing is best ignored or even viewed as a buying opportunity.