National Credit Ratings

From Business Week:

... Standard & Poor's sovereign ratings are predictors of default risk. Essentially they measure the ability of the government to pay its debt on time. To come up with a sovereign rating, S&P looks at political risk, income and economic structure, growth prospects, fiscal balances, debt stocks, contingent fiscal risks, monetary policy, and external liquidity and external debt (debt owed to foreign creditors). At this point, 19 countries (out of 193) have S&P's highest sovereign rating of AAA, which means that the government "has an extremely strong capacity to meet its financial commitments."

Definitely worth going through the slideshow. Most of the countries on the list have relatively low population. In fact only the U.S. has more than 85M. But with the Republicans running up current account and trade deficits like crazy, how much longer will the U.S. have a AAA rating :-)