Matt Levine, Columnist

Rating Italy's Debt Hardly Seems Worth the Trouble

Next time S&P downgrades Italy it should do it in a coffee-table book about Caravaggio, that'll show them.

February 5, 2014 at 5:41 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Today's looniest financial story is surely that Italy's state auditor, the Corte dei Conti, has opened an investigation into Standard & Poor's, Moody's and Fitch for downgrading Italy's debt over the past couple of years. Loony first of all for the reasoning:

But also for the size of the claim: "Standard & Poor's revealed on Tuesday it had been notified by Corte dei Conti that credit rating agencies may have acted illegally and opened themselves up to damages of €234bn." Two hundred and thirty-four billion euros! Obviously I typed that with my pinky on the corner of my mouth.