At last some good news for the UK. Moody’s has stripped the country of its triple A rating. Similar moves by the bond raters in the past have actually turned out to be somewhere between non-events to a buy rating for debt and equity investors.

Take the US. Standard & Poor’s removed its triple A rating in August of 2011. US Treasuries rallied afterwards, eventually hitting new historic lows last July. Hey, if the US is not triple A, who is? Not France, apparently. In January of 2012 S&P said France was no longer worthy of the coveted three As. The bond market initially shrugged, but yields since on 10-year bonds have dropped to 2 per cent now versus 3 per cent just ahead of the downgrade. Since the US downgrade, the S&P 500 has returned 30 per cent, while shareholders of French stocks earned more than 20 per cent since it lost the top tier ratings.

Of course, other factors have coincided with downgrades to push and pull global stock and bond markets in recent years (thank you, Mr Central Bank). And, the downgrade is a blow to George Osborne who pledged to keep the country’s ratings intact. The rating agencies are still trying to regain their legitimacy after mis-rating hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgage bonds in the run-up to the financial crisis. But all of the UK’s problems are well documented. Just ask some currency traders. Moody’s isn’t breaking any news.