All week he has been trying to scare us all that the UK is about to lose its Triple-A credit rating. Here is Doomsayer George quoted in Reuters (via the Daily Telegraph) yesterday:

“The bulk of dealing with the deficit has to come from spending restraint. Unfortunately, the measures announced yesterday don’t start tackling the deficit until 2014/15 and that is far too late. The thing I am aiming for is making sure that Britain keeps its credit rating.”

Steady there soldier. Moody’s (a credit rating agency, just in case you didn’t know) Senior Vice President, Tom Byrne, has a different view:

“The outlook is stable.”

And:

“Their [UK and US] resiliency will be tested in the next couple of years but for now they have a high degree of ‘financeability ‘ and debt affordability. The rise in debt and higher interest costs could test ratings under some scenarios but not right away.”

The UK and US are defined as ‘resilient’ which in Moody’s terminology means:

“Aaa countries whose public finances are deteriorating considerably and may therefore test the Aaa boundaries, but which display, in our opinion, an adequate reaction capacity to rise to the challenging and rebound.”

So the state of the finances is something to be concerned about and to be watched very closely. But to suggest that the UK’s credit rating is imminently threatened is sensationalist and exaggerated.

In response to this and other misunderstandings, Open University student, Claire Spencer, has written to George Osborne with an invitation. She is about to begin a module on ‘economics and economic change’ and she has asked the Shadow Chancellor (or the ‘Chancellor’ as Tom Bradby would call him) to join her in a study group. Her invitation is below:

Well, why not send George an email- osborneg@parliament.uk – encouraging him to join Claire’s study group? You can even add a nice kiss at the end too. It will make his day.