Does anyone else see the extreme Irony in this scenario? Moody's is the same company that rated all these shit mortgage backed securities AAA in the first place, they played a prominent role in the housing collapse because no one would have bought that shit paper if it was rated "D" which was the proper rating on most of it in the first place. Now just 2 years after helping destroy our economy, while the world economy is still spinning, largely because of their incompetence, Moody's somehow, once again has the world by the balls, because they are threatening to downgrade U.S. debt. Im not one for conspiracy theories, but it seems to me that if you really wanted to fuck up the economy world wide you would be far better off doing it from Moody's than Goldman Sachs.
SnP's David Beers is the big cheese these days. I was surprised to see he wrote a book about sovereign defaults. I might look into this, mnnn interesting.
Please cut the shit with the whole "conspiracy theories" once and for all. If the outright fraud and corruption that led up to the first crisis in 2008 AND the ensuing alphabet soup of bailouts didn't clue you in to the fact that things were never as they seemed, then nothing will. Ratings agencies are analogous to Arthur Andersen doing Enron's books.
I consider a conspiracy something different than complacency/corruption. I realise they were all working hand in hand, but i dont think they were working hand in hand to intentionally nuke the economy. So while i understand they were all corrupt, i dont think it was some giant conspiracy to intentionally fuck up the economy. Goldman knew that they had sold all kinds of shit paper and they took positions accordingly, however i dont think that even they could grasp how far reaching what they had done was, so i call it corruption, not conspiracy. Now if i see goldman taking large USD/bond/stock shorts in the next few days, and moody's all of a sudden comes in with a downgrade out of nowhere which devastates the world economy i might change my mind. :I was just pointing out the position Moody's has over the economy, whereby they once again have us by the balls. Anyways thats my 2 cents.
Yes it is another tragic irony. When testifying about their role in facilitating the whole sub prime meltdown meltdown what came out what this. "A credit rating is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold securities and may be subject to revision, suspension or withdrawal at any time by any one or more of the Rating Agencies. Each credit rating should be evaluated independently of any other credit rating." In short they said, hey, we just gave our opinion. We have no liability in this. It's on you what you do with your money. Right then and there they should have locked up every one of these worthless fucks.