And the rest of the world is watching, and commenting

We may have kept the AAA rating on our bonds, but not our AAA rating of how the world views us, and this asset is perishable like soft fruit,  let it rot and you don't get it back.  Here is what others say of the recent debt ceiling brawl and the ugliness of it:
From Hindustan Times, "If routine has become Armageddon, the US cannot be counted on when the tough decisions are being made."  Indian Express op-ed takes aim at the most august of American institutions: "The United States is the home of what Americans like to say is the world's greatest constitution, but is in fact the world's most outdated." Sharma argues it was "written for an age before railroads".


Our banker, the Chinese, State wire service Xinhuaexpressed its dismay at the potential of a default in the run-up to the final debt decisions, calling the political brinkmanship in Washington "dangerously irresponsible" in an editorial last week and noting that the "ugliest part of the saga is that the well-being of many other countries is also in the impact zone when the donkey and the elephant fight."


The much trampled Greeks got their chance to take a swing, Greek broadsheet Ekathimerini writes that the United States today "displays all the signs of decadence that condemned all previous superpowers: Stability and prosperity allowed small groups to gather disproportionate power, and they then forced the state to serve their interests at the expense of those of society as a whole."


Russia, here we get labeled Parisites, for gobbling up the worlds resources then sucking up all the worlds credit to pay for it, leaving other nations at risk.


England's Guardian economic editor Larry Elliott compares the United States to a "tinpot Latin American dictatorship circa 1980" and calls it a "country where a plutocracy is firmly in control,"


The Germans are just scratching their heads wondering, how the fuck did we lose to these guys.