The New York Stock Exchange, Wall Street, New York.

Dr Peter Morici: The Standard & Poor’s downgrade of US government debt can only have lasting economic consequences if it significantly affects the interest rates US government pays or political machinations in Washington.

Global investors have little alternative but to continue to do business in dollars and store wealth in Treasuries. The bonds denominated in other reserve currencies - - the yen and euro - - are simply unavailable in suitable quantities.

Japanese institutions hold most of Japan’s privately-held sovereign debt - - simply the Japanese have too high a savings rate, and their government borrows from them, through banks and funds, to finance deficits that keep its economy going.  As the long term prospects are for the yen to rise against the dollar, global investors are holding about all the yen-denominated sovereign debt they can get their hands on.

The  Eurozone has no central government that can levy taxes, spend significant sums, and issue bonds. Instead, investors must purchase euro-denominated debt issued by the member states.

The largest issuer of euro bonds is Italy, and it is doubtful that investors would swap US Treasuries for Rome’s paper. Even if more German and French sovereign bonds were available, the future of the euro is so much in doubt -- and likely to stay in doubt for many years - - that the long term stability of even the strongest Eurozone economies is uncertain.  

US bonds are subject to the risk of unanticipated inflation if the US government keeps printing too many bonds and greenbacks but that risk pales in comparison to the risk that the Eurozone will disintegrate and seriously impair the German and French economies.

The fact is Washington prints the world’s currency, and will likely do so for a very long time to come.  

China, the biggest purchaser of US debt, likes to carp about US fiscal affairs but will keep on buying dollars to maintain an undervalued yuan and convert those into Treasuries. Otherwise, Beijing must finally let the yuan rise significantly against the dollar, and that would end China’s export boom and bubble economy.

Longer term, all the debt Uncle Sam is piling up is bad for the United States but the problem won’t be resolved anytime soon.

The Administration treated the S&P downgrade like it does all other bad economic news -- it sought to blame others, circumstances and the messenger. The Tea Party, bad luck like the Japanese earthquake and the competence of the S&P staff - - who used CBO (Congressional Budget Office) numbers to assess the future of the US debt burden - - were all cited by the President’s surrogates in interviews and the Sunday talk show circuit.

Communications in the White House are such a closed loop that the Administration does not even recognize help when it gets it from critics. The S&P report gave the President ammunition to push for higher taxes - - ill-advised as that might be.

The S&P report pointed to political dysfunction in Washington, fingered Republican reluctance to raise taxes and cited skyrocketing health care costs. It did not single out Democrats resistance to cutting Medicaid and Medicare, and this despite spending is more the problem than taxes. Simply, spending is up $1.1trn over the last four years, when only $200bn was needed to cover inflation, whereas reinstituting the Bush tax cuts for all brackets would raise revenues by only $300bn.

The report went on at some length about how different taxing scenarios would affect the situation. It said little about what curbing US health care spending to German levels—also a private system—would do to future US debt, or even adopting Congressman Paul Ryan’s reforms would effect.

After a temporary disruption in stock and bond markets, this report is likely to little affect what the US government, companies or consumers pay for debt.

At the time of the downgrade, the stock market was in an adjustment owing to concerns about the economy. Neither those nor the deficit worries will abate until the President offers the country a plan to get the economy going - - other than blaming others, hoping for a favorable turn of events or criticizing those that keep score on the economy and government’s performance.

An Economy Without Direction: The stock market started to dip before the downgrade of US debt, says Steven Rattner, former auto czar: