Comment by MattGaiser
6 months ago
They shopped around to different ratings agencies and only hired those that provided the better results.
You would need to classify everything from consumer reports to industry awards to not inviting influencers who give negative reviews to events as stealing as well.
Yeah, no. Credit agencies weren’t hapless victims of market forces.
> Another email between colleagues at Standard & Poor's written before the bubble burst, suggests awareness of what would happen to the securities they were giving top ratings to: "Rating agencies continue to create and [sic] even bigger monster--the CDO market. Let's hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters."
They were willing participants precisely because they were making huge fees to look the other way.
> One study of "6,500 structured debt ratings" produced by Standard & Poor's, Moody's and Fitch, found ratings by agencies "biased in favour of issuer clients that provide the agencies with more rating business. This result points to a powerful conflict of interest, which goes beyond the occasional disagreement among employees."
These kinds of things are deals negotiated at the highest level of the companies involved. Credit agencies were paid to give the crime the banks were doing a veneer of respectability.
> These kinds of things are deals negotiated at the highest level of the companies involved
To me it just seems a more or less natural outcome of the major structural flaws in the whole business model. I’m not sure you need an explicit conspiracy for credit agencies to begin behaving in such a way that maximizes their revenue, it was mostly just a natural outcome of competition and extremely useless and inefficient regulation. If anyone deserves to go to prison it’s the people who were supposed to be regulating the banking industry.
Obviously the Federal government had zero interest in doing that but if they only went after the bankers it would have quickly become obvious that they are not the only ones to blame.
“You don’t need an explicit conspiracy for pig butchering. It’s a natural outcome of competition in the black market and extremely poor security and training.”
If you can actually draw a distinction between what scammers do and what companies do other than “we explicitly have laws on the books to treat it as a crime” I’d love to hear it. There’s a lot of similarities between corporations and criminal organizational - it’s just groups of people who are trying to make money.
And as for who deserves to go to prison, the ratings agencies refused to pay market rates to retain talent being poached by the banks. The same happens in government. So basically the banks continually poach the best people and create incentives to keep the status quo and for regulators to turn a blind eye so that they can land at the bank later. You can go after the regulators but I don’t think that’s going to be an effective strategy to solve the problem.
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