The Last Mystery of the Financial Crisis
RollingStone.com - Matt Taibbi, 6/19/13
It's long been suspected that ratings agencies like Moody's and Standard & Poor's helped trigger the meltdown. A new trove of embarrassing documents shows how they did it
Thanks to a mountain of evidence gathered for a pair of major lawsuits by the San Diego-based law firm Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd, documents that for the most part have never been seen by the general public, we now know that the nation's two top ratings companies, Moody's and S&P, have for many years been shameless tools for the banks, willing to give just about anything a high rating in exchange for cash.
'You F--ked Up, You Trusted Us': Talking Ratings Agencies With Chris Hayes
One institutional investor, he wrote, "admitted that it did no more than look at the rating and the yield on a Bloomberg screen, spending no more than five minutes deciding to invest $50 million." All they did was look at our rating before investing! What idiots!
This is straight out of Animal House. It's the Wall Street version of, "You fucked up – you trusted us!"
