Yeah, several large nations require their cash investments to be AAA rated. By law they will now sell off all their US dollars, and put it elsewhere. Don't know how that's going to play out. Historically he US government likes to fiddle with its dollar to keep it high, even in the face of recessions, which is when other nations usually let their currency dive, which makes exports from those countries very attractive, which grows their own domestic jobs, trade surpluses, and helps the nation out of recession.
You might find this list of rankings of GDP interesting.
GDP. In 2010, the European Union topped out at 16 million million. US was next at 14.6 million million. China and Japan are a long way third and fourth at 5.8 and 5.4 million million respectively. The list starts counting member nations of the EU separately, I'll ignore them. The UK, 2.2 million million. Canada 1.6, India 1.5, Russia 1.4, Australia 1.2 (bizarrely, since we only have less than 2% of the world's population, comes in 13th. It's because we're literally selling our country out from under us in the form of ore exports.) Mexico 1.039 million million goods and services in a year, world's number 14th, not bad for a country routinely perceived as a basket case.
And the last country with over a million million GDP in a year is South Korea at 1.007
So now we have to cross reference with national credit ratings to find where world cash is going to flee to. The EU would he the obvious short term inheritor of de facto World Superpower as America drifts, if it wasn't so crippled by the Global Financial Crisis, with member nations still staggering around defaulting n stuff.
Edited, Aug 6th 2011 2:08pm by Aripyanfar