cnbc's finest hour.... pummeling s&p head

i'm a big critic of cnbc, but i enjoyed the questioning of the S&P head just now. he had no answers and they didn't give him a pass.

now, back to your regularly scheduled market collapse...

 

i think dylan's line was way off base. his basic question was: "how can you cut these ratings right now and singlehandedly tank the stock of aig?" well the job of sandp is to rate these companies objectively. it is not to support or crush the stock price. the ramification of the rating agency stating the truth objectively should not get them chewed out.

 

Are you kidding? How long is it taking S&P to rate the whole financial sector objectively? Apparently, they had no problem collecting fees on the way up and giving all that crappy paper AAA rating.

 

I saw the interview. I agree with the reporters what good is a rating agency if they cant predict the company is in troble till it loses 90 % of its value. I mean come on. They should have been able to forcast a lot beter than they did.

 

i hear a lot of firms have downgraded AIG from 'Strong Buy' to just 'Buy'

 

they pounded on the guy because they had no other guests to pound on..

notice the shortage of "analysts" that were willing to appear today.

and the on-air staff was reduced to interviewing each other and trying to find good news. a farce of a network

 

These type of interviews are a waste of time. Obviously a smart person is not going to admit to being at fault to this mess! Lawyers tell them to say nothing!

 

Maria B. said that she talked to trading desks and they told her that there were was good buying coming in . . . that was just around 3PM.

Poor Maria.
She's become such a tool.

 

Lehman only has one sell, great work from Wall Street.


http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ao?s=LEH

 

i'm not saying anything came of it. what i liked was someone bluntly questioning a rating agency in a straight forward manner about how they could have rated all this shit paper (literally!) AAA. the follow question of 'you were clearly wrong then, could you at least entertain the possibility that your ratings now could prove to be wrong too'. of course, he didn't answer, but the deer in the headlights look in response to a very accurate statement/question was quite entertaining to me.

to me, identical to the late 90's when arthur andersen was signing off on 10q's and 10k's that they knew were 100% fantasy. S&P is just as guilty as they were.