Panama Upgraded to "Investment Grade" - U.S. Economy Still Sucking

Last Tuesday, Fitch Ratings upgraded Panama's rating to "investment grade". Here is a link to short blog article. A lot of people in Panama have been anticipating this for the last few months, so there has been a lot of excitement.

Of course, this is happening in stark contrast to everything we are seeing and hearing about the U.S. economy right now. It seems like a lot of people in the U.S. have decided that it is a good time to go back to school. I am one of those people. I had always planned to eventually go to law school, and when the real estate market went south I decided it might be a good time to hide out from the job market for a few years.

The problem with this plan is that a lot of us are accumulating a shit-ton of grad school debt. I have been told that we are apparently expected to pay that back at some point. BU Law is a top-20 law school, but there are a whole lot of BU Law students that will be doing "public-interest" (read "unpaid") internships this summer. Many law students hope for a career in the public-interest sector and would be doing this kind of work anyway. On the other hand, there are PLENTY of students who will be working for free this summer simply because law firms just aren't hiring summer associates like they have in the past. Law firms hire less summer associates, because they know they will not be able to make offers to all the "freshly-minted attorneys" coming out of law school in the next few years. I'll keep this post short, because there are plenty of people a lot smarter than me who can offer much more intelligent commentary on the economic situation in the U.S. Suffice to say that these are scary times for all of us...