As the housing market collapsed in late 2007, Moody's Investors Service, whose investment ratings were widely trusted, responded by purging analysts and executives who warned of trouble and promoting those who helped Wall Street plunge the country into its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
I suppose you could ask yourself how things could get like that and maybe the answer would be that money trumps anything remotely resembling ethics, honor, or other old fashioned behavior like that. You see:
The ratings agencies were under no legal obligation since technically their job is only to give an opinion, protected as free speech, in the form of ratings.
Now that might interact with this if a bunch of near crooks were running the show:
To promote competition, in the 1970s ratings agencies were allowed to switch from having investors pay for ratings to having the issuers of debt pay for them. That led the ratings agencies to compete for business by currying favor with investment banks that would pay handsomely for the ratings they wanted.
Wall Street paid as much as $1 million for some ratings, and ratings agency profits soared. This new revenue stream swamped earnings from ordinary ratings.
"In 2001, Moody's had revenues of $800.7 million; in 2005, they were up to $1.73 billion; and in 2006, $2.037 billion. The exploding profits were fees from packaging . . . and for granting the top-class AAA ratings, which were supposed to mean they were as safe as U.S. government securities," said Lawrence McDonald in his recent book, "A Colossal Failure of Common Sense."
Hey, how's that 401K looking these days? Ain't their problem, bucko. AAA horseshit.
Oh yeah, you can just bet the Senate will clean up this mess - sure, and I've got a bridge...
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