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.