So, S&P finally gets around to Cutting Ireland’s Rating on the Cost of Bank Support, as reported by CNBC:
Ireland’s financial headache worsened on Wednesday after Standard & Poor’s cut its credit rating in a move criticized by the country’s debt management agency.
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The premium investors demand to hold Ireland’s 10-year bonds over German bunds has been steadily widening in the past few weeks and remained elevated at 327 basis points on Wednesday.
The spread finished at 330 bps on Tuesday, its highest level since the Greek financial crisis broke in May.
Brenda Kelly, an analyst at CMC Markets, said she expected Irish borrowing costs to climb on the back of S&P’s move.
“I think we are going to have to an awful lot more in interest payments,” she said.
Although Ireland has raised virtually all of the 20 billion euros of long-term debt targeted for 2010, S&P’s move may make it more difficult for the country’s banks to extend the maturity of their funding later this year and eventually wean themselves off a state guarantee on their debt.
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S&P cut Ireland’s long-term rating by one notch to ‘AA-’, the fourth highest investment grade, and assigned the country a negative outlook late on Tuesday saying the cost to the government of supporting the financial sector had increased significantly.
Rating agencies have been steadily hacking away at Ireland’s credit rating and S&P’s is now on a par with Fitch and one notch below Moody’s, which cut its rating to Aa2 last month.
S&P said it expects Ireland will need to spend 90 billion euros to support its banking system, up from its prior estimate of 80 billion euros including capital used to improve the solvency of financial institutions and losses taken from loans the government acquired from banks.
Ireland’s budget deficit ballooned to 14 percent of gross domestic product, the highest in Europe, last year due to the cost of propping up nationalized lender Anglo Irish ANGIB.UL and it could climb higher if Dublin injects an additional 10.05 billion euros into the bank…
I’m not going to say I told you so, but I did throw some pretty strong hints…
On April 29th, I was quite blatant in stating “Beware of the Potential Irish Ponzi Scheme!”, urging my susbscribers to review the 
Irish Bank Strategy Note and the Ireland public finances projections that I made available earlier that month. You see, unlike many of the pundits in Europe who state that Ireland has moved beyond the worst of its problems and is an example of how austerity should work, I believe that Ireland is in very, very big trouble and I outlined the reasoning behind such in my very first posts on the Pan-European Sovereign Debt Crisis.
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