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WorldPosted at: May 19 2025 8:01PM


Trump disagrees with Moody's downgrade of US rating - White House

Washington, May 19 (UNI) US President Donald Trump does not agree with the Moody's rating agency downgrading of the country's government rating, as the US's economy has the confidence of "people around the world," White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said on Monday.
On Friday, Moody's downgraded the long-term issuer and senior unsecured ratings of the United States government from AAA to AA1 and changed the outlook from negative to stable. According to the agency, the decision reflected the increase in government debt and interest payment ratios "to levels that are significantly higher" than those of other similarly rated economies. In response, White House spokesperson Kush Desai said that the agency's reputation was ruined by its inaction under the previous US administration. On Sunday, US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent replied to the agency's decision by calling it a "lagging indicator."
"The president talked about this over the weekend. The secretary of the treasury also talked about it. When you look at the world, the world has confidence in the United States of America and our economy once again. The President, just last week, secured trillions of dollars in investments from countries in the Middle East. We have seen trillions of dollars of investments flowing into our economy since the president took office. That is because people around the world have confidence in the United States of America ... The president has added nearly a half million jobs to the American economy already, so there is a lot of optimism in this economy, and the president disagrees with that assessment," Leavitt told a briefing.
Earlier in the day, White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said that the economic performance of the United States under the Trump administration remains positive and that the ratings are unlikely to affect that.
"We have had big positive surprises with the jobs numbers. If you look at core GDP, it was about 3%. There was that weird thing where they [the rating agencies] probably did not adjust the imports correctly. We have got inflation going back to the [US Federal Reserve's] target, and we had something like $20 billion in tariff revenue. And so everything that the president said would happen has been happening. We have got no runaway inflation. We have got lots of tariff revenue, which, by the way, should affect the credit rating in the end," Hassett told FoX Business when asked to comment on whether the ratings can affect the US economy's growth.
He also said that the country's debt ceiling is likely to go up after The One, Big, Beautiful Bill passes Congress but added that "it always goes up."
"Make no mistake, the US's debt is the safest bet on Earth. There is no country's debt that I would rather have than the United States,' and so Moody's can do what it wants to. As Secretary Bessent said, it is a backward-looking thing, penalizing us for all the reckless spending of the [former US President Joe] Biden administration ... We have every reason in the world to believe that we are going to have the best economy on Earth. If you have the best economy on Earth, you are going to have the best debt on Earth too. And that is the way I would rate it. The Hassett rating agency would give it an AAA," Hassett added.
The US's credit rating was previously downgraded by other major rating agencies, Fitch Ratings and S&P, in 2023 and 2011, respectively. The US national debt now stands at $36 trillion, while interest rates are in the 4.25%–4.5% range.
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