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US Stock market futures pointed to a sharply lower open on Wall Street Monday following on from last weeks downgrade of America’s credit rating from triple-A for the first time in history by ratings agency Standard & Poor’s (S&P).

S&P came in for significant criticism from US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said the rating agency showed “terrible judgment” in lowering the US government’s credit rating, forcing S&P to defend its position on Monday.

Geithner said the agency’s decision showed a “stunning lack of knowledge” about the basic maths used to develop the government’s budget.

David Beers, global head of sovereign ratings at S&P, defended the rating agency’s position, despite the discovery of a $2 trillion error in the firm’s calculation of the projected debt to GDP ratio for the U.S.

“It is a complete mis-characterization on the Treasury’s part about what happened in that highly technical discussion,” Beers said. “These are large numbers…(but) even with these adjustments, the debt burden is rising so the substance of what we’re saying has not changed,” he told CNBC on Monday.

Warren Buffett, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, however told CNBC there was no question that the United States’ credit rating was still triple-A, and that he was not changing his mind about US Treasurys based on S&P’s downgrade.

“If anything, it may change my opinion on S&P,” Buffet added.

However Jim Rogers, chairman of Rogers Holdings, told CNBC he believed It was “physically, humanly impossible for the U.S. to ever pay off its debt. They can roll it over and continue to play the charade, but the U.S. is bankrupt.”

Across the globe markets fell sharply in response to Friday evening’s announcement.

In Japan, the benchmark Nikkei average [.N225  9097.56  -202.32  (-2.18%)   ] closed down 2.2 percent to 9097.6 points, while the broader Topix ended lower at 2.3 percent to 782.9 points.

Markets across Europe also opened lower — down around 2 percent across the board — despite an announcement ahead of the opening of the markets from the European Central Bank (ECB) that it was entering the bond market to buy Italian and Spanish sovereign debt.  Unlike most European markets, Spanish and Italian indexes managed to hold onto gains.

The ECB issued a statement on Sunday welcoming fiscal reforms in Spain and Italy, and the support for a longer-term bond buying mechanism, the European Financial Stability Facility, by the French and German governments.

Traders told Reuters, ECB buying was focused on the 5-year sector of the curve, where Italian yields dropped 65 basis points to 4.85 percent, while the Spanish equivalent was 69 bps lower at 4.734 percent.

But Dow Jones reported the spread on French five year credit default swaps reaching record levels, widening by 12.5 basis points to 157, according to Markit.

However, Europe’s main markets fell in volatile trading with the FTSE, the DAX and the CAC40 all down between 1.5 and 2.5 percent.

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