Danny Schechter - ColdType

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frankly, the product of conflicts of interest and very strong
pressure from Wall Street on the credit rating agencies.
“Taken together, the loans, the securitization and the insurance
was part of a transaction pipeline – a highway of fraud
and deception.”
What do the ratings agencies say? Not much. Elizabeth
McDonald reported on EMAC’s stock watch:
The agencies, which are not government run and are publicly
traded, wrongfully gave top notch Triple-A ratings to Kryptonite
derivatives, (many of them subprime-mortgage bonds)
just before that market collapsed. …
Congress at the time released internal memos written by
executives at Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, as well as
email exchanges, instant messages, all pointing to how insiders
at these companies knew (emphasis mine) they were
botching the job – and did little to stop the worst credit crisis
in history from happening.
According to one internal message, Moody’s top executive
Ray McDaniel wrote that Moody’s “analysts and MDs [managing
directors] are continually ‘pitched’ by bankers, issuers,
investors” and sometimes “we ‘drink the Kool-Aid.’
The markets have known about this problem for years. The
credit rating agencies were painfully slow to warn investors
about the problems at Bear Stearns, Enron and WorldCom,
just to name a few calamities.
The fact that Warren Buffet, the so-called “Oracle of Omaha,
“and an Obama supporter had invested in Moody’s adds a
certain unlikely twist to this issue.
At the same time, larger, arguably more important issues
are still being downplayed.
What has been the societal impact of so many CEOs and
firms making bad loans and then taking excessive salaries by
extracting more wealth from investors and customers? This is