Wall Street is screaming at Congress not to pass Pres. Donald Trump’s “one, big, beautiful” bill.
They’re also screaming at Congress and the courts to check and balance Trump and screaming for Trump to stop trying to fuck with the rest of the government.
But you’d barely know all this from most coverage of the Moody’s credit-rating agency downgrading America’s rating last week.
Political coverage focused on the political reaction, without adjudicating the fingerpointing. Business-news coverage focused on the rising debt.
You have to work to find coverage bridging the two and spotlighting the political implications of the reasons for Moody’s downgrade. You’d hardly guess Moody’s warned that Trump’s autocratic tendencies threaten the economy.
Not helping the public understanding here is Republicans straight-up lying to credulous media about about why Moody’s straight-up warns we’ll go straight down the crapper with this bill.
If you’re lucky, you’ll catch a headline that blames the Moody’s downgrade on rising debt. But debt’s been rising forever. So why downgrade now?
When you read Moody’s’ release — which is very diplomatic but mostly not in economic or business jargon — the inescapable conclusion is that it’s a massive flare warning Washington: Do. Not. Do. This.
The reason to downgrade now is precisely to warn that it’s not the past debt that was just golly so bad that now Moody’s has to reluctantly downgrade despite the nifty job Trump is doing; it’s the debt resulting from what he’s about to do.
And Moody’s isn’t the only portion of Wall Street concerned about Trump’s bill.
Earlier today, The Economist — like, the actual publication literally called “The Economist” — directly urged Congress to kill the bill:
The new debt that Trump’s bill creates is freaking out bond traders already nervous about existing debt. “I hope the Republican majority in Congress realize that the bond market is watching,” economist Ed Yardeni told Politico.
That story was headlined subtly: “Debt cloud suddenly hangs over megabill talks.” The subheadline was a bit more pointed: “Wall Street is warning Washington about another deficit-buster. Most Republicans aren’t worried.”
The Washington Post’s Heather Long is an admirable exception in the coverage.
“…make no mistake: Moody’s didn’t just pick a random Friday in May to make this move. Moody’s wanted to send a message to Republicans in Congress: Rethink the tax bill. Or, better yet, don’t do it.”
Again, though, the subheadline for Long’s piece should have been the main headline. Imagine if the Washington Post flipped these:
And also, why is this an opinion piece? It’s not an opinion that Moody’s was saying that, it’s a paraphrase!
Look at what Moody’s literally wrote. In lay speak, it’s don’t do the big tax cuts:
“We do not believe that … reductions in mandatory spending and deficits will result from current fiscal proposals under consideration.” (Gee, what “current fiscal proposals” might be under consideration? It ain’t Medicare 4 All or hiking the minimum wage, Bunky!)
“Over the next decade, we expect larger deficits as entitlement spending rises while government revenue [mostly taxes] remains broadly flat… The US' fiscal performance is likely to deteriorate.” And then, the coup de grâce:
“If the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is extended … it will add around $4 trillion to the federal fiscal primary (excluding interest payments) deficit over the next decade.” And then, the coup de more grâce:
“As a result, we expect federal deficits to widen … driven mainly by increased interest payments on debt, rising entitlement spending, and relatively low revenue generation.”
That last part is important, and Moody’s repeats it. The problem isn’t just spending, it’s also low taxes. You heard me, Newsfucker: Wall Street wants Trump to raise taxes. (Just not theirs.)
In fact, sometimes Moody’s lists raising taxes before cutting spending: “[M]aterially increasing government revenues or reducing spending … could lead to an upgrade.”
And it’s not just the bill that Moody’s is warning about. It’s democracy. They’re mostly worried about Trump usurping the Federal Reserve. But not only.
“…while recent months have been characterized by a degree of policy uncertainty [that’s Wall Street for batshit-bananas], we expect that the US will continue its long history of very effective monetary policy led by an independent Federal Reserve.”
“The stable outlook also takes into account institutional features, including the constitutional separation of powers among the three branches of government… we expect them to remain strong and resilient [so no fuckin’ monkey business, monkey-in-chief].”
“…we assume that the long-standing checks and balances between the three branches of government and respect for the rule of law will remain broadly unchanged.”
“The rating also could be downgraded if policy effectiveness or the strength of institutions were to erode…”
A lot of political journalists — including me! — are woefully illiterate/innumerate about economic issues. That’s one reason we haven’t had better coverage bridging the political and economic factors at work here.
But another is that the Trump administration lies like shameless fuck. In fact, when it comes to lying their asses off, they’re the Ozempic of lying.
National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett told reporters whoever’s still allowed to ask questions, “This downgrade is something that happened because of the runaway spending of the previous administration.”
NBC’s Kristen Walker asked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent about the downgrade and he told her, “It's the Biden administration and the spending that we have seen over the past four years.”
Welker responded, “Fair enough.” But is it fair enough? Or even insufficiently fair? Hell, is it even true? Did Moody’s really blame the previous four years of spending?
It would be fair enough to say, “No.” Here’s Moody’s own words from Moody’s own release (emphasis added for Bessent lying his ass off):
“This one-notch downgrade … reflects the increase over more than a decade in government debt and interest payment ratios...”
“Successive US administrations and Congress have failed to agree on measures to reverse the trend of large annual fiscal deficits and growing interest costs…”
“Over more than a decade, US federal debt has risen sharply due to continuous fiscal deficits. During that time, federal spending has increased while [somebody’s!] tax cuts have reduced government revenues.”
So, who’s been president for almost half of that decade, Mr. Secretary Lie-face? And who has spent more money so far this year than the Biden administration did during the same period in 2024?
Not a lot of media picked up on that Moody’s line about successive administrations. And even those that did didn’t make clear that this includes Trump’s first term!
Yahoo! Finance Senior Columnist Rick Newman quoted the line, but incoherently excised Trump from the space-time continuum to portray him as a victim of predecessors who don’t include him:
“Presidents from Reagan in the 1980s to Biden in the 2020s bemoaned the mushrooming national debt but did essentially nothing about it…
“…the bill is finally coming due, making President Trump the unlucky inheritor of a debt bomb constructed and fused by his profligate predecessors.”
I mean, what a Yahoo! Trump is the luckiest inheritor in human history. The only time inheriting hasn’t benefited him is right now, when he’s inheriting from himself.
And as for Newman’s both-sidesing of the debt, it sure would help if we had some visual representation of the last half-century’s changes in the national debt that showed us whether some presidents did less nothing than others:
Trump’s first term was so damaging that Moody’s was clear about it during Trump’s first term. Here’s Moody’s in 2018 explicitly warning that Trump’s 2017 tax cuts would worsen downward pressures on America’s then-perfect credit rating:
“The recently-agreed tax reform will exacerbate and bring forward those pressures…”
Good call, Moody’s! And last week, Moody’s made it clear that the pivot point on which the downgrade pivoted didn’t come during the previous four years, saying America’s fiscal problems have now outweighed the positives: “[T]he US' significant economic and financial strengths … no longer fully counterbalance the decline in fiscal metrics.” That was as of Friday. Not as of Jan. 19.
Hassett also complained about Moody’s accounting, telling Fox that Moody’s should have factored in all that juicy, juicy tariff revenue from the future. In Hassett’s defense, tariffs are taxes and Moody’s did say raise taxes!
Except, (a) how the fuck could Moody’s calculate tariff revenue when no one knows what the tariff rates are gonna be, and (b) some of the tariff revenue is supposed to come from a foreign-groundswell of investments in the U.S., which so far aren’t materializing.
Also, Moody’s did take tariffs into account. Not the way Hassett wanted, but with a sad trombone: “GDP growth is likely to slow in the short term as the economy adjusts to higher tariffs.”
So, is Hassett any better than Moody’s at predicting the future? If you’re wondering, TFN highly recommends picking up Hassett’s book “Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting from the Coming Rise in the Stock Market,” published shortly before the dot-com crash of 2000. (The Dow did finally hit 36,000 in 2021. Under Pres. Joe Biden.)
You might also be interested to know that, serving in Trump’s first administration, Hassett reassured the White House in March 2020 that COVID deaths would peak in April 2020.
(Have Hassett’s analytical skills improved since then? This February, he said the Canada tariffs aren’t part of a trade war, they’re part of the drug war.)
Also lying about the downgrade was Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), who was markwayne lyin’ when he downplayed the downgrade, telling reporters that Moody’s “has done this every time we run up against a debt limit or we run up against a spending bill.”
As Politico noted, Moody’s has never done this in history, going all the way back to the 6,000 years ago when Mullin’s god created the Earth and all the fake fossils older than 6,000 years old.
As for our immediate future, that depends on how loudly Wall Street is willing to scream about this bill, whether that scream makes the leap from the business pages to the political media, and whether that scares Republicans of any faction enough to back down.
TFN creator and writer Jonathan Larsen co-created Up w/ Chris Hayes and wrote for Countdown with Keith Olbermann at MSNBC, helped launch CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360° and Air America Radio, and has also worked at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Young Turks.
We are all screaming into the void. And fuck the republicans for making me scream the same things Wall Street is screaming.
The Republicans hate you. They look you right in the face and lie because they have an agenda. The agenda is they want to take away from the little guy, the poor guy, the guy who needs help and they want to give to the rich people. It's that simple. And they say they want to do it because they need to balance the budget. But that's also a lie, because they don't care about the budget, they're going to balloon, the deficit, like crazy, just to give some more money to people who don't actually need it. They don't care about the budget. They just care about hurting the little guy because they want to hurt people. They hate you. And the MAGA base, well, they just eat that up. And in secret, the Republicans hate them too.