Posted on 02/03/2015 5:12:45 AM PST by HLPhat
With its case against Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services nearing the finish, the Justice Department has turned its attention to another credit-rating firm under fire for issuing rosy grades on mortgage deals in the buildup to the financial crisis.
Justice Department officials in recent months have quietly met with multiple former executives of Moody’s Investors Service to discuss ratings of complex securities before the crisis, according to people familiar with the situation.
The Justice Department lawyers probing Moody’s are still in the early stages of their investigation, according to people familiar with the matter. It isn’t yet clear whether it will result in a lawsuit, the people said.
A Moody’s spokesman declined to comment.
In the recent wave of meetings, Justice Department officials, citing internal company emails, have pressed former Moody’s executives on whether the firm compromised standards to win business, according to people familiar with the matter. The main focus, as with the S&P case, has been on residential-mortgage deals from around 2004 to 2007, the people said.
Moody’s, a division of Moody’s Corp., and S&P, a unit of McGraw Hill Financial Inc., gave triple-A ratings to those mortgage deals, making it possible for even conservative investors to buy securities backed by subprime loans that later turned out to be risky. When the housing market collapsed, losses on those bonds spread everywhere and deepened the crisis, costing investors billions of dollars.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
"An announcement of a more than $1.37 billion settlement among S&P, the Justice Department and more than a dozen states could come early this week, according to people familiar with the matter."
So another batch of dirtbags get off with a slap on the wrist and a fine they'll pay with the money they stole - and no jail time.
Moodys must be shaking in their SOX./s
FAIL
Multiple perp walks are missing from these investigations. They sold AAA ratings to the highest bidder.
Bowbama, DOJ and the gubment in general still reeling from the Moody’s downgrade!
Yup, it is all BS. The G gets paid off with its after the fact extortion from the bandits and everyone goes away free as a bird but guilty as sin.
The only proper resolution for this was to invade the wall street area and open fire with MG 42s. These guys virtually declared war on the US through their crooked deals and almost sunk the entire economy. 7 years later, the ship of state if still bailing water. Those who did not lose their shirt in this fiasco are suffering to pay for it through a lack luster economy for those working and for those who are on fixed income virtually zero interest on their savings assuming they were not savaged like my neighbor who lost 30% of his pension due to the fund’s investments in AAA rated, ha, securities.
Please note that the FDIC’s Division of Resolutions & Receiverships is starting to hire again, less than six months after 1000 term employees’ contracts were ended. There have been very few large bank failures over the past few years, just community banks. There is cause for concern IMO.
Who was the Godfather of Subprime, who did he buy the Ambassadorship to the Netherlands from?
Who is Penny Pritzker, and why how did she become Secretary of Commerce after her Chicago family's Superior Bank failed in 2001?
Why aren't certain individuals in the photo above laundering their SOX in prison?
"By the end of 2007 this figure had risen to $596 trillion and in 2009 it stood at $615 trillion. (source: BIS: [4])"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivatives_market
Got Aaa$$paper?
>>Please note that the FDIC’s Division of Resolutions & Receiverships is starting to hire again
Planning a fire sale are they?
http://consumerist.com/2010/02/02/get-1000-in-ameriquest-mortgage-settlement/
Managers at Argent/Ameriquest laughed and said that was "chump change" [Didn't they Dave].
Lots of people belong in JAIL - beginning with loan execs who falsified thousands of FICO scores on loan apps and thus misrepresented material facts that would've affected decisions related to the resulting securitized instruments.
Each and every bank closed by the FDIC over the past 5-6 years had dozens of reasons why they went down. Bankers are sweating bullets over all those loans they made to the oil patch when oil was at $90-100 a barrel.
Others point to a third factor at play — the so-called Anderson effect. In 2002, the accounting giant Arthur Anderson went out of business following its conviction for obstruction of justice. Ever since, prosecutors have voiced concern that similar convictions could lead to thousands of additional job losses and disruption in the markets.
Hmm. Well, just a thought for Generation XBox to consider, but -- maybe deliberately facilitating the gaming of systemic corruption shouldn't be a carreer path?
>>Bankers are sweating bullets over all those loans
>>they made to the oil patch when oil was at $90-100 a barrel.
“We’re conservative” {uhhhhhh} “but progressive”.
Just what ya want to hear in a job interview with a bankster, ehh?
>>Multiple perp walks are missing from these investigations.
What will/has Generation XBox learned from that lack of consequence?
>>Bankers are sweating bullets over all those loans they made to the oil patch
Could this mean the fracking fluid Governor Chickenlooper’s cronies put on tap wasn’t quite so tasty after all?
Meanwhile bottled drinking water is now more expensive per oz than gasoline.
Ooops.
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