The Sovereign Debt Crisis has been sitting in the background ready to bite back but most of the worlds media has ignored it. Today's news that credit rating agency Standard & Poor's has downgraded Japan's credit rating from AA to AA-, citing Japan's worsening debt situation for the demotion, is being reported but not highlighted. Standard & Poor's move has been taken because they expect Japan's debt, which already stands at almost twice the country's annual economic output, to continue rising for about 15 years, because S&P believe that Japan's government "lacked a coherent strategy" for tackling the debt problem and because "Japan's government debt ratios - already among the highest for rated sovereigns - will continue to rise further than we envisaged and will peak in the mid 2020s".
The BBC have reported this story but are not giving the prominence that it is due. I believe that this is for two reasons; first that they are concentrating as much as possible on attacking the News of the World, and by extension Rupert Murdoch, as much as possible as a way of trying to get the takeover of BSkyB refused or at least delayed, second the BBC don't want news that a country has had its credit rating downgraded because its government "lacked a coherent strategy" for tackling debt to become more widely understood - after all their Labour allies have a deficit denier as Shadow Chancellor now.
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Despite its awesome financial resources, the BBC consisistently ignores almost all news from a whole swathe of countries in the World including Japan but, in this case, it is obvious why.
If someone had said to me 20 years ago that Japan would be in this position, I would have laughed.
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