Evelyn Reynolds

Economists had been wary of strong economic data, worried that it meant inflation might stay high. Now they are starting to embrace it.Good news is bad news: It had been the mantra in economic circles ever since inflation took off in early 2021. A strong job market and rapid consumer spending risked fueling further price increases and evoking a more aggressive response from the Federal Reserve. So every positive report was widely interpreted as a negative development.But suddenly, good news is starting to feel good again.Inflation has finally begun to moderate in earnest, even as economic growth has remained positive and the labor market has continued to chug along. But instead of interpreting that solid momentum as a sign that conditions are too hot, top economists are increasingly seeing it as evidence that America’s economy is resilient. It is capable of making it through rapidly changing conditions and higher Fed interest rates, allowing inflation to cool gradually without inflicting widespread job losses.A soft economic landing is not guaranteed. The economy could still be in for a big slowdown as the full impact of the Fed’s higher borrowing costs is felt. But recent data have been encouraging, suggesting that consumers remain ready to spend and employers ready to hire at the same time as price increases for used cars, gas, groceries and a range of other products and services slow or stop altogether — a recipe for a gentle cool-down.“If you go back six months, we were in the ‘good news is bad news’ kind of camp because it didn’t look like inflation was going to come down,” said Jay Bryson, chief economist at Wells Fargo. Now, he said, inflation is cooling faster than some economists expected — and good news is increasingly, well, positive.

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Year-over-year percentage change in the Personal Consumption Expenditures index
Source: Bureau of Economic AnalysisBy The New York TimesMarkets seem to agree. Stocks climbed on Friday, for instance, when a spate of strong economic data showed that consumers continued to spend as wages and price increases moderated — suggesting that the economy retains strength despite cooling around the edges. Even the Fed chair, Jerome H. Powell, has suggested that evidence of consumer resilience is welcome as long as it does not get out of hand.“The overall resilience of the economy, the fact that we’ve been able to achieve disinflation so far without any meaningful negative impact on the labor market, the strength of the economy overall, that’s a good thing,” Mr. Powell said during a news conference last week. But he said the Fed was closely watching to make sure that stronger growth did not lead to higher inflation, which “would require an appropriate response for monetary policy.”Mr. Powell’s comments underline the fundamental tension in the economy right now. Signs of an economy that is growing modestly are welcome. Signs of rip-roaring growth are not.In other words, economists and investors are no longer rooting for bad news, but they aren’t precisely rooting for good news either. What they are really rooting for is normalization, for signs that the economy is moving past pandemic disruptions and returning to something that looks more like the prepandemic economy, when the labor market was strong and inflation was low.As the economy reopened from its pandemic shutdown, demand — for goods and services, and for workers — outstripped supply by so much that even many progressive economists were hoping for a slowdown. Job openings shot up, with too few unemployed workers to fill them.

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Monthly job openings per unemployed worker
Note: Data is up to June 2023 and is seasonally adjusted.Source: Bureau of Labor StatisticsBy The New York TimesBut now the economy is coming into better balance, even though growth hasn’t ground to a standstill.“There’s a difference between things decelerating and normalizing versus actually crashing,” said Mike Konczal, director of macroeconomic analysis at the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal research organization. “You could cheer for a normalization coming out of these crazy past couple years without going the next step and cheering for a crash.”That is why many economists seem to be happy as employers continue to hire, consumers splurge on Taylor Swift and Beyoncé concert tickets, and vacationers pay for expensive overseas trips — resilience is not universally seen as inflationary.Still, Kristin Forbes, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said it was too simple to argue that all signs of strength were welcome. “It depends on what the good news is,” she said.For instance, sustained rapid wage growth would still be a problem, because it could make it hard for the Fed to lower inflation completely. That’s because companies that are still paying more are likely to try to charge customers more to cover their growing labor bills.And if consumer demand springs back strongly and in a sustained way, that could also make it hard for the Fed to fully stamp out inflation. While price increases have moderated notably, they remain more than twice the central bank’s target growth rate after stripping out food and fuel prices, which bounce around for reasons that have little to do with economic policy.“We are closer to normal now,” said Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “It makes it seem like good news is good news again — and that’s certainly how investors feel. But the more that good news becomes good news, the higher the likelihood of a recession.”Mr. Strain explained that if stocks and other markets responded positively to signs of economic strength, those more growth-stoking financial conditions could keep prices rising. That could prod the Fed to react more aggressively by raising rates higher down the road. And the higher borrowing costs go, the bigger the chance that the economy stalls out sharply instead of settling gently into a slower growth path.Jan Hatzius, the chief economist at Goldman Sachs, thinks the United States will pull off a soft landing — perhaps one so soft that the Fed might be able to lower inflation over time without unemployment having to rise.But he also thinks that growth needs to remain below its typical rate, and that wage growth must slow from well above 4 percent to something more like 3.5 percent to guarantee that inflation fully fades.“The room for above-trend growth is quite limited,” Mr. Hatzius said, explaining that if growth does come in strong he could see a scenario in which the Fed might lift interest rates further. Officials raised rates to a range of 5.25 to 5.5 percent at their meeting last month, and investors are watching to see whether they will follow through on the one final rate move that they had earlier forecast for 2023.Mr. Hatzius said he and his colleagues weren’t expecting any further rate moves this year, “but it wouldn’t take that much to put November back on the table.”One reason economists have become more optimistic in recent months is that they see signs that the supply side of the supply-demand equation has improved. Supply chains have returned mostly to normal. Business investment, especially factory construction, has boomed. The labor force is growing, thanks to both increased immigration and the return of workers who were sidelined during the pandemic.Increased supply — of workers and the goods and services they produce — is helpful because it means the economy can come back into balance without the Fed having to do as much to reduce demand. If there are more workers, companies can keep hiring without raising wages. If more cars are available, dealers can sell more without raising prices. The economy can grow faster without causing inflation.And that, by any definition, would be good news. More

Global stock markets fell sharply on Wednesday after ratings agency Fitch downgraded the United States’ long-term foreign currency issuer default rating from AAA to AA+.
Hentov was part of the Standard & Poor’s team that famously downgraded the U.S. government’s credit rating in 2011, at the time citing political polarization after a prolonged and fraught squabble in Washington over raising the debt ceiling.
“It does not take a grand sovereign and analytics genius to understand that the fiscal profile of the U.S. is much worse than it has been,” said Hentov.

Fitch Ratings in New York, United States.
Cem Ozdel | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images

Growing political instability means the U.S. will not regain its AAA rating with Fitch for the foreseeable future, according to Elliot Hentov, head of macro policy research at State Street Global Advisors.
Global stock markets fell sharply on Wednesday after ratings agency Fitch downgraded the United States’ long-term foreign currency issuer default rating from AAA to AA+, citing “expected fiscal deterioration over the next three years” and an erosion of governance in light of “repeated debt-limit political standoffs and last-minute resolutions.”

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Big-name bank bosses and economists dismissed the decision, saying it “doesn’t really matter,” and Hentov agreed that he did not think it was a “material development.”

“The ratings are basically a slow-moving signal,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Thursday.
“I think it does not take a grand sovereign and analytics genius to understand that the fiscal profile of the U.S. is much worse than it has been, the governance in charge of public debt is much worse than it has been, and it’s frankly not comparable to any of the other AAAs out there.”
Hentov was part of the Standard & Poor’s team that famously downgraded the U.S. government’s credit rating in 2011, citing political polarization after a prolonged and fraught squabble in Washington over raising the debt ceiling.
In May of this year, another standoff between the White House and opposition Republicans over raising the U.S. debt limit once again pushed the world’s largest economy to the brink of defaulting on its bills, before President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy struck a last-minute deal.

Asked if the U.S. was likely to regain its “risk-free” AAA rating from Fitch anytime soon, Hentov responded with a flat “no.”

“That’s the short answer, unless you imagine that U.S. politics takes a turn for a much more stable, predictable path.”
Jim Reid, head of global economics and thematic research at Deutsche Bank, said that despite the debt ceiling dispute parallels, the August 2011 downgrade from S&P came against a very different political backdrop.
“The debt ceiling fight and downgrade happened concurrently. In addition the S&P was the first to downgrade the U.S. from AAA and the immediate shock was far more profound than it could be with a second agency doing it 12 years later,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve had been cutting rates and committed at its August policy meeting to keep rates at an “exceptionally low level until at least mid-2023,” Reid highlighted in an email Wednesday. More

Fitch’s credit-rating decision stemmed from concerns about America’s ability to govern itself, along with the nation’s growing debt load.The downgrade of the United States’ debt by a major ratings firm is a damning indictment of the country’s fractious politics and a blot on its financial record that is unlikely to be quickly erased. But many investors and analysts say it won’t affect the government’s ability to keep borrowing money.On Tuesday, Fitch Ratings lowered the credit rating of the United States one notch to AA+ from a pristine AAA. The firm, citing a “deterioration in governance” along with America’s mounting debt load, suggested that it could be a long time before that decision was reversed.“Our base case is that deficits will remain high and the debt burden will continue to rise,” said Richard Francis, co-head of the Americas sovereign group at Fitch and its primary analyst for the United States, in an interview on Wednesday. “I think it is unlikely that there will be any meaningful changes.”The move — like the drop to AA+ in 2011 by S&P Global, which has kept its U.S. rating there — followed partisan brinkmanship over America’s debt ceiling, which caps how much money the government can borrow. The United States came within days of defaulting on its debt this spring as Republican lawmakers refused to lift the cap unless President Biden made concessions on spending. The two sides ultimately reached an agreement on May 27, just days before the Treasury Department projected that the government could run out of cash.With both Fitch and S&P now carrying a lower assessment, the United States’ credit rating, at least for most investors, will no longer be considered among the top tier, which includes Germany, Australia and Singapore.While the move is something of a black eye, market watchers expect the practical impact to be small. Analysts at Wells Fargo noted that the early feedback from their clients was that their appetite to keep lending to the government wasn’t likely to change much.That’s because the U.S. Treasury market is the largest sovereign debt market in the world, underpinning borrowing costs across the globe, with Treasuries owned by investors of all stripes. The U.S. rating remains among the highest in the world, backed by a strong and diverse economy and aided by the central global role of the country’s currency.“This is largely a symbolic move,” said Peter Tchir, head of macro strategy at Academy Securities.Stock markets slumped on Wednesday, and the yield on Treasuries — which indicates how much investors are demanding to be paid in exchange for lending to the government — rose. But analysts suggested that had more to do with rising government borrowing forecasts, resulting in higher interest rates and pointing to increased costs for companies, too.Fitch downgraded America’s debt on the day that former President Donald J. Trump was indicted on charges related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, which culminated in an attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The attack showcased deep distrust in the government and the rule of law.Despite the suspension of the debt limit in June, future fiscal fights — including a possible government shutdown this fall — are looming. The lack of comity between the political parties means the cap is likely to remain a political tool, with no guarantee that a compromise will always be reached.That increased polarization was central to Fitch’s decision. Mr. Francis said intense partisanship had inhibited decisions on better budgeting and the debt ceiling, with both Democrats and Republicans unmovable on policies that could improve the country’s fiscal position. These include, he added, changes to taxes, military spending, and Social Security and Medicare, which are expected to face ballooning costs as more baby boomers retire.“There is no willingness on any side to really tackle the underlying challenges,” Mr. Francis said.The ratings agency also cited the Jan. 6 attack as a concern that fed into the downgrade.“There’s the debt ceiling standoff, there is this painful budgeting process, there is political polarization that is ongoing and probably deteriorating — and then there is the Jan. 6 insurrection, but that is one factor among many,” Mr. Francis said.The Federal Reserve’s rapid interest rate increases have compounded some of those factors by raising borrowing costs, forcing the government to borrow even more money to account for higher interest and other payments to bondholders.On Wednesday, the Treasury Department detailed its plans to borrow over $1 trillion for the third quarter, which runs from July through September. The estimate, announced on Monday, is $274 billion more than the Treasury had forecast in May. The United States current debt is $32.5 trillion.More borrowing means more debt for investors to digest. A larger supply of Treasuries while investor demand stays the same, or even shrinks, means higher borrowing costs for the government. The 10-year Treasury yield rose 0.07 percentage points on Wednesday to 4.09 percent, its highest level since November.Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen continued to criticize the Fitch decision on Wednesday, describing it as “puzzling” and “entirely unwarranted.”“Its flawed assessment is based on outdated data and fails to reflect improvements across a range of indicators, including those related to governance, that we’ve seen over the past two and a half years,” Ms. Yellen said during an event in Virginia.Still, there does not seem to be any movement toward one solution that Fitch and many analysts have said would help the United States return to its higher rating: getting rid of the debt ceiling.Mr. Francis said it would “probably be helpful” to get rid of the debt limit if the United States ever wanted to regain a higher rating. Despite Mr. Biden’s desire to alter the process, there has been no indication that any changes are coming soon.Instead, Republicans and Democrats returned to the kind of partisan bickering that helped fuel the downgrade, with each side blaming the other for it.“The downgrade comes just months after Biden and congressional Democrats took the country to the brink of default and amid an increasingly unsteady economic path,” said Jake Schneider, director of rapid response for the Republican National Committee.The Democratic National Committee blamed the tax cuts and spending policies that were initiated by Republicans and Mr. Trump when he was president, saying the downgrade was “a direct result of Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans’ extreme and reckless agenda.” More

The Fitch Ratings logo is seen at their offices at Canary Wharf financial district in London, Britain.
Reinhard Krause | Reuters

It’s not a growing jobs market, strong U.S. dollar or a resilient economy that will help the U.S. regain the top rating from Fitch. According to the firm, it’s going to take a major step up in governance.
Fitch Ratings cut the United States’ long-term foreign currency issuer default rating to AA+ from AAA on Tuesday, sending global stock markets down on Wednesday. The agency had placed the country’s rating on negative watch in May, citing the debt ceiling issue. 

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“This is a steady deterioration we’ve seen in the key metrics for the United States for a number of years. In 2007, general government debt was less than 60% and now it’s 113%, so there has been a clear deterioration,” Richard Francis, Fitch’s co-head of the Americas sovereign ratings, said Wednesday on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.” “Furthermore, we’re expecting fiscal deficits to rise over the next three years and we expect debt to continue to rise over the next three years.”
Francis said that, in addition to the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, the rating agency has noted a “constant brinkmanship” surrounding the debt ceiling among both Republicans and Democrats. That has hindered the U.S. government from coming up with meaningful solutions to deal with growing fiscal issues, particularly around entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, he said.

To regain the top rating, Francis said the rating agency would watch for a long-term fiscal solution that addresses entitlement programs and for a willingness to look at the revenue, as well as the spending side, of such programs. He also said Fitch would look for a reduction of the deficit, and for the government to tackle the debt ceiling issue by suspending or getting rid of it.
“Given the high level of the debt, given the increasing deficits that we’re expecting, and given the kind of deterioration in governance and unwillingness to really tackle these issues, we don’t think that’s consistent with the AAA anymore,” Francis said.
Many reactions, from high-profile economists to the White House, have been critical or dismissive of the downgrade given the resilience of the nation’s economy. 

In response to pushback, Francis said that although the economy is very important and could have an impact on the overall fiscal picture of the U.S., it will not be enough to tackle the governance issues.
“This idea that the economy somehow, we skirt a recession and there should not be a downgrade, that’s just not really what we’re looking at,” he said. “We’re looking at a more fundamental picture of the United States, creditworthiness and also kind of what we expect to happen over the next few years.” More

If you have never had the option to work from home because your job must be done in person, tell us how your commute has shifted over the past three years.Cities and workplaces have been upended since the pandemic began. Some people moved from cities to suburbs. Stores and restaurants moved out of busy downtown areas. Train and bus schedules shifted.The New York Times is reporting on how commuting has changed over the last three years for people who have never had the option to work from home because their jobs must be done in person — in health care, hospitality, food service, manufacturing, building maintenance, sanitation, public safety, you name it. We’d like to hear about your experiences. We may use your contact information to get in touch with you, and we won’t use your submission without first confirming with you that it’s OK.Tell us about your commute. More

Private sector job gains in July totaled 324,000, driven by a 201,000 jump in hotels, restaurants, bars and affiliated businesses, payroll processing firm ADP reported.
That total was well above the Dow Jones estimate for 175,000, though it marked a decrease from the downwardly revised 455,000 in June.
The services sector was responsible for 303,000 jobs on the month.

Sinking Spring, PA – April 19: The sign at the McDonald’s restaurant on Penn Ave in Sinking Spring, PA April 19, 2021 with a message on a board below it that reads “Work Here $15 $15 $15”. (Photo by Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images)
Medianews Group/reading Eagle Via Getty Images | Medianews Group | Getty Images

Private sector companies added far more jobs than expected in July, pushed higher by a boom in leisure and hospitality jobs, payroll processing firm ADP reported Wednesday.
Job gains for the month came to 324,000, driven by a 201,000 jump in hotels, restaurants, bars and affiliated businesses. That total was well above the Dow Jones consensus estimate for 175,000, though it marked a decrease from the downwardly revised 455,000 in June.

The report provides another indication that the U.S. jobs market has retained its strength despite an extended Federal Reserve campaign to slow the economy and bring down inflation.
“The economy is doing better than expected and a healthy labor market continues to support household spending,” said Nela Richardson, ADP’s chief economist. “We continue to see a slowdown in pay growth without broad-based job loss.”
Services-related industries dominated job creation during the month as the economy continues its transition back from being goods-oriented in the early days of the Covid pandemic. The sector was responsible for 303,000 jobs on the month.
Along with the big move in leisure and hospitality, information services added 36,000 positions; trade, transportation and utilities grew by 30,000; and the other services category, which encompasses things such as dry cleaning, housekeeping and the like, contributed 24,000.
Goods producers added just 21,000, as natural resources and mining increased by 48,000 but manufacturing lost 36,000. Construction was responsible for the other 9,000.

ADP also noted that wages increased by 6.2% from a year ago, well above the long-term pace but the lowest growth since November 2021.
The ADP report serves as a precursor for Friday’s more widely followed nonfarm payrolls count from the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. The numbers can differ widely, as they did in June when ADP’s 455,000 total was well above the 209,000 from the BLS.
Through the first six months of the year, ADP had averaged 256,000 a month while the BLS was at 278,000. The Dow Jones estimate for the official July government report is 200,000.
Also of note from the ADP report was that the job gains were concentrated in firms with fewer than 50 employees, which were responsible for 237,000 positions. Companies with between 50 and 499 employees added 138,000, while big firms lost 67,000. More

Fitch announced late on Tuesday that it had cut the U.S. long-term foreign currency issuer default rating to AA+ from AAA.
U.S. stock futures were sharply lower after the downgrade, while markets in Europe and Asia also sank.

Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, June 29, 2023.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters

Global stock markets tumbled on Wednesday after ratings agency Fitch downgraded the United States’ long-term credit rating — but top economists say there is nothing to worry about.
Fitch announced late on Tuesday that it had cut the U.S. long-term foreign currency issuer default rating to AA+ from AAA, citing “expected fiscal deterioration over the next three years,” an erosion of governance in light of “repeated debt-limit political standoffs” and a generally growing debt burden.

U.S. stock futures were sharply lower after the downgrade, pointing to a fall of almost 300 points for the Dow Jones Industrial Average at the Wednesday open on Wall Street.
The pan-European Stoxx 600 index dropped 1.6% by mid-morning in London, with all sectors and major bourses trading deep into the red, while stocks in Asia-Pacific also plunged across the board overnight.
High-profile economists including former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and Allianz Chief Economic Advisor Mohamed El-Erian lambasted the Fitch decision, with Summers calling it “bizarre and inept” and El-Erian “perplexed” by the timing and reasoning. Current Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen described the downgrade as “outdated.”
Goldman Sachs Chief Political Economist Alec Phillips was also quick to point out that the decision did not rely on new fiscal information and is therefore not expected to have a lasting impact on market sentiment beyond immediate shock selling on Wednesday.
Phillips said the downgrade “should have little direct impact on financial markets as it is unlikely there are major holders of Treasury securities who would be forced to sell based on the ratings change.”

“Fitch’s projections are similar to our own — they imply a federal deficit of around 6% of GDP over the next few years — and Fitch cites CBO (collateralized bond obligation) projections in its medium-term outlook, so the downgrade does not reflect new information or a major difference of opinion about the fiscal outlook,” he said in a note Tuesday.
Though this was the first downgrade of its kind since 1994, Fitch’s fellow ratings agency S&P downgraded the U.S. sovereign rating in 2011 and although it had a “meaningfully negative impact” on market sentiment, Phillips noted that there was “no apparent forced selling at that time.” The S&P 500 index recovered 15% over the following 12 months.
“Because Treasury securities are such an important asset class, most investment mandates and regulatory regimes refer to them specifically, rather than AAA-rated government debt,” he said, while also noting that Fitch did not adjust its “country ceiling,” which remained at AAA.
“If Fitch had also lowered the country ceiling, it could have had negative implications for other AAA-rated securities issued by U.S. entities,” Phillips added.
This view was echoed by Wells Fargo Securities Head of Equity Strategy, Chris Harvey, who said the Fitch downgrade “should not have a similar impact to S&P’s 2011 downgrade (SPX 1-day: -6.7%), given the starkly different macro environments and other reasons.
“Wells Fargo believes any pullback in stocks would be “relatively short and shallow.”
Harvey noted that, ahead of the 2011 S&P downgrade, stocks were in correction territory, credit spreads were widening, rates were falling, and the global financial crisis “was still in the market’s collective conscience” — whereas the conditions today are “almost the opposite.”
Other triggers for consolidation
Though the prevailing macro message was one of looking past the Tuesday downgrade, veteran investor Mark Mobius told CNBC on Wednesday that the move may cause investors to rethink their strategies on U.S. debt and currency markets.
“I think from a longer term perspective people are going to begin to think that they’ve got to diversify their holdings, first away from the U.S. and also into equities because that’s a way to protect them from any deterioration of the currency — the U.S. dollar or for that matter any other currency,” Mobius, founding partner of Mobius Capital Partners, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe.”

Though he still anticipates U.S. stock markets will continue rising alongside global peers, he suggested that stateside allocations within investment portfolios may come down slightly and redirect toward international and emerging markets.
Virginie Maisonneuve, global CIO of equity at Allianz Global Investors, meanwhile told CNBC on Wednesday that the market should be looking at other potential triggers for a more prolonged downturn.

“The markets clearly have to pay attention, but we have to remember it’s still investment grade and it’s reflecting the past,” she said of the Fitch call.
“There are other potential triggers for consolidation. We have to remember we’ve had very strong markets, we have the macro peaks — so we have inflation peak, we have growth slowing down, but we still have core inflation.”
She noted that core inflation in Europe has proven stickier than expected, while wheat and grain prices continue to react to developments in Ukraine and could exert further stoke food inflation. More

The ratings agency, which lowered the U.S. long-term rating from its top mark, said debt-limit standoffs had eroded confidence in the nation’s fiscal management.The long-term credit rating of the United States was downgraded on Tuesday by the Fitch Ratings agency, which said the nation’s high and growing debt burden and penchant for brinkmanship over America’s authority to borrow money had eroded confidence in its fiscal management.Fitch lowered the U.S. long-term rating to AA+ from its top mark of AAA. The downgrade — the second in America’s history — came two months after the United States narrowly avoided defaulting on its debt. Lawmakers spent weeks negotiating over whether the United States, which ran up against a cap on its ability to borrow money on Jan. 19, should be allowed to take on more debt to pay its bills. The standoff threatened to tip the United States into default until Congress reached a last-minute agreement in May to suspend the nation’s debt ceiling, which allowed the United States to keep borrowing money.Despite that agreement, the federal government now faces the prospect of a shutdown this fall, as lawmakers spar over how, where and what level of federal funds should be spent. The nonstop dueling over federal spending was a major factor in Fitch’s decision to downgrade America’s debt.“The repeated debt-limit political standoffs and last-minute resolutions have eroded confidence in fiscal management,” Fitch said in a statement. “In addition, the government lacks a medium-term fiscal framework, unlike most peers, and has a complex budgeting process.”Fitch pointed to the growing levels of U.S. debt in recent years as lawmakers passed new tax cuts and spending initiatives. The firm noted that the U.S. had made only “limited progress” in tackling challenges related to the rising costs of programs such as Social Security and Medicare, whose costs are expected to soar as the U.S. population ages.Fitch is one of the three major credit ratings firms, along with Moody’s and S&P Global Ratings. In 2011, S&P downgraded the U.S. credit rating amid a debt-limit standoff — the first time the United States was removed from a list of risk-free borrowers.By one common measure, Fitch’s move downgrades America’s credit rating not only under the rating agency’s own assessment, but also for the blended rating of the three largest agencies.At the margin, the move by Fitch could limit the number of investors able to buy U.S. government debt, analysts have warned. Some investors are bound by constraints on the quality of the debt they can buy, and those that require a pristine credit rating across the three major agencies will now need to look elsewhere to fulfill investment mandates.That could nudge up the cost of the government’s borrowing at a time when interest rates are already at a 22-year high. Most analysts, however, doubt that the impact will be severe given the sheer size of the Treasury market and the ongoing demand from investors for U.S. Treasury securities.Still, the downgrade is a blemish on the nation’s record of fiscal management. The Biden administration on Tuesday offered a forceful rebuttal of the Fitch decision — criticizing its methodology and arguing that the downgrade did not reflect the health of the U.S. economy.“Fitch’s decision does not change what Americans, investors, and people all around the world already know: that Treasury securities remain the world’s pre-eminent safe and liquid asset, and that the American economy is fundamentally strong,” Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said in a statement.Ms. Yellen described the change as “arbitrary” and noted that Fitch’s ratings model showed U.S. governance deteriorating from 2018 to 2020 but that it did not make changes to the U.S. rating until now.Biden administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that they had been briefed by Fitch ahead of the downgrade and made their disagreements known. They noted that Fitch representatives repeatedly brought up the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection as an area of concern about U.S. governance.The downgrade came on the same day that former President Donald J. Trump was indicted in connection with his widespread efforts to overturn the 2020 election, which fueled the Jan. 6 riot.Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, said the Fitch downgrade was the fault of Republicans, who refused to raise America’s borrowing cap without steep concessions. He urged them to stop using the debt limit for political leverage.“The downgrade by Fitch shows that House Republicans’ reckless brinkmanship and flirtation with default has negative consequences for the country,” Mr. Schumer said.The debt limit agreement reached in June cuts federal spending by $1.5 trillion over a decade, in part by freezing some funding that was projected to increase next year and capping spending to 1 percent growth in 2025.Lawmakers and the White House avoided making big cuts to politically sensitive — and expensive — initiatives, including retirement programs. Even with the spending curbs the national debt — which is over $32 trillion — is poised to top $50 trillion by the end of the decade.It is unlikely that the downgrade by Fitch will convince lawmakers to drastically change the fiscal trajectory of the United States.“Instead of effectuating change, or fiscal discipline, our base case expectation is that Fitch will be pilloried by most members of Congress,” said Henrietta Treyz, director of macroeconomic policy research at Veda Partners. “It will not yield either deficit reduction, tax increases, reductions in military spending, entitlement reform or a change to the 12 appropriations bills that have already moved with substantial bipartisan support in the U.S. Senate.” More