Did you know? 評級公司幕後老闆

睇野吾好睇表面.

這已是路人皆知，前文曾説過這些收水分析評級公司真正老闆是大量科水給他們的投行，比得越多，評級越好。冰島當年咁嘅環境都可以被評爲AAA, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers 金融海瀟前還是 AA 及 AAA rating. 所以D Rating 真假信不信由你了。Bloomberg又爲甚麼那麼有膽量揭發呢？莫非分莊唔勻？

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Rating Agencies Scam the World

Oct 31, 2011

After the collapse of Lehman Brothers in late 2008, you would think we should have learned a lesson—that leverage is dangerous, that the banking system is fundamentally flawed, and that ratings agencies are useless. The latest news of the imminent demise and fire sale of broker-dealer MF Global shows that those lessons were truly lost.

ZeroHedge posted the current ratings from our favorite rating agencies:

“And the winners are.... Moody's Ba2-; S&P: BBB-; Fitch: BB+;”

And just to throw insult to injury, today Bloomberg released a video about an interesting study that confirms our worst suspicions—that ratings agencies are a pay to play operation—meaning the more a company pays, the higher the rating.  

 As we wrote in a July blog article, Outsourcing Your Thinking to… Ratings Agencies?, it was the ratings agencies that rubber-stamped the shenanigans of the biggest perpetrators of the sub-prime mortgage meltdown in 2007 and 2008.

During the housing and financial crisis, ratings agencies lost a ton of credibility by dubiously giving mortgage-backed securities top ratings, by grossly underestimating their probability of default, and by getting paid conflictingly by the borrowers.

In the 1970s, the Securities and Exchange Commission gave the three biggest ratings agencies, Moody’s, Fitch Ratings, and Standard and Poor’s, the title of Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations—effectively making them the official deciders of financial soundness.

And the same thing happens every time—in the case of the tech bubble, the Enron/WorldCom fiascos, and the toxic mortgage-backed securities bubble, the gatekeeping was assigned to an outside entity. In short, investors outsourced thinking so they wouldn't have to make difficult and time-consuming decisions themselves. Instead, they would just sit back and rely on the analysts, consultants, accountants, and ratings agencies to do their thinking for them.

In August Standard & Poors shocked the world by stripping U.S. Treasuries of the AAA rating they have enjoyed since 1941. In an indicator of the uncertainty of the world economy, investor response was to drive U.S. bonds up—despite the downgrade they were still considered to be among the safest investments out there. Many said S&P’s downgrade of U.S. debt was a knee-jerk reaction to the bitter criticism it received for its role in the financial crisis.

But the larger question is, for how long will the ratings agencies continue to turn blind eyes to the increasingly unsustainable U.S. debt load? As the Bloomberg report reveals, ratings agencies are in bed with the very institutions they grade. As we wrote in July, best to look at the big picture and determine for oneself how safe U.S. bonds are—and for how long.