The ratings agency Standard and Poor’s is threatening another downgrade of the United States credit rating if the Super Committee doesn’t get results.

Maybe S&P is right to fear a tectonic adjustment in US economic policies.

It may look fine from reading balance sheets in a conference room at the Treasury Department, but at the ground level, the awfulness of the HAMP program, and what it’s doing to American conceptions of their government, really hits you.

I know, I know: David Cameron, the guy who overcame his privileged and cosseted upbringing, is the one who’s actually going to be living at that address. But the man who put Cameron at Number Ten Downing is a Frenchman named Baudoin Prot, the chief executive officer of BNP Paribas, a huge multinational banking firm — and Cameron and the Tories had better do as he says, or he can break them just as he made them.