Topic: How To Invest

What is Pat's commentary for the week of January 17, 2012?

Article Excerpt

If you Google “Black Friday”, 172 million references come up. This tells you something about the broad use of the term, which has been used to describe days of upsetting financial news for at least the past 150 years. According to recent headlines, the latest Black Friday happened on Friday, January 13. That’s when Standard & Poor’s cut its credit rating on France and eight other eurozone countries. Some investors fear this might set off a new round of European debt turmoil and a new slump in the stock market. I think the downgrades merely sum up the current state of affairs in European finances. That’s what rating agencies do: gather up all available info on the creditworthiness of a borrower or the investment quality of a security. They don’t predict how likely it is that a borrower or security will default on its obligations. They just analyze the information and boil it down into a rating that conveys the agency’s assessment…