What Price Moody’s U.S. Credit Downgrade? Anxious World Awaits Explanation from Credit Experts Needleman, Steinberg, and Gillett.

Friday’s downgrade of the credit rating of the United States government must have cost someone a lot of dosh. That would be the inescapable conclusion of anyone paying attention to recent events in Connecticut.

On December 19th, an opinion piece bearing the names of Senator Norm Needleman (D-Essex) and Representative Jonathan Steinberg appeared in the online CT Mirror, accusing credit ratings agency S&P of lowering in connivance with the utility Eversource. The co-chairs of the legislature’s energy committee and credit ratings experts declared, “To suggest that these ratings agencies are independent or objective is nonsensical.”

Now we know. Powerful forces with a lot of money to spread around the ratings agencies are at work. Only fools—in this case the certain members of press for whom Needleman and Steinberg have only disdain—would believe those credit ratings are legitimate estimations of a company’s or government’s financial prospects.

Maybe Needleman and Steinberg are not rating agency experts. The authorship of that December polemic has been in doubt since the Courant’s Ed Mahony revealed a December 16th exchange of text messages suggesting Public Utilities Regulatory Authority (PURA) chair Marissa Gillett had a hand in writing the screed. Gillett and her two disciples who serve as chairs of the committee that in theory oversees PURA deny she played any role in creating the controversial op-ed.

Evidence undermining their claims continues to tumble into the public square. PURA recently (and belatedly) disclosed in litigation that Gillett urged agency staff members to “enjoy” the op-ed in an email containing end-of-year best wishes, adding a message in tune with the piece Needleman and Steinberg continue to insist they wrote, “Don’t believe the utility company propaganda.”

As the utility companies press their claims against PURA bias in court, the light does appear to be growing closer to the details of the provenance of that lethal op-ed.

All people of goodwill hope Needleman, Steinberg, and Gillett have been telling the truth. If they have not, the damage to the public trust they exercise will be incalculable—and ruinous to them, as well.

In the meantime, an anxious world hopes the three are spending the weekend on a CT Mirror piece explaining who gains from manipulating Moody’s into Friday’s downgrade. This weekend may Gillett once more tell Steinberg that “I have finished my draft,” her staff is reviewing it, and she will send it to her two centurions “later today.”

And then we will know the truth of a major global event from Connecticut’s three unlikely credit agency experts who were made for this moment.

Published May 17, 2025.