Credit rating by country

The financial crisis has put a lot of pressure on countries' long-term foreign currency credit ratings, with France recently being downgraded by S&P. Wikipedia provides a list of countries by credit ratings as report by US rating agencies S&P, Fitch, Moody's and Dagong, a Chinese rating agency.

So, what does the world look like today through the eyes of those rating agencies?

I use the R packages XML and googleVis to read and display the data from Wikipedia with just a few lines.


The geo maps show the data as sourced from Wikipedia on 17 January 2012.

Question: Is it a surprise that the views of the US and Chinese rating agencies differ on their home countries?

Here is the R code to replicate the geo maps: