Seriously, the balls on these guys.
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[…] the ratings agencies have paid no price for their part in the meltdown last year and are still slapping triple A ratings on anything that moves so that the big swinging dicks on Wall Street can swindle pension funds out of their […]
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[…] the ratings agencies have paid no price for their part in the meltdown last year and are still slapping triple A ratings on anything that moves so that the big swinging dicks on Wall Street can swindle pension funds out of their […]
Svensker
Why? They didn’t pay any price for their first go round — in fact they were rewarded. Why not do it again? They have nothing to lose. The rest of us, different story, but why should they care?
scav
So, maybe, we could arrange for some hemp-bungie-jumping lessons for a few specially chosen financial wonders. Might as well use the bridges we’ve had to buy.
Mr Furious
Christ on a fucking crutch. I’m still waiting for the regulatory part of the bailout. And the rating agencies need to be put through the freaking wringer.
And I hear ya Svensker. It would be almost stupid if they DIDN’T try it.
freelancer
Scuse me, Scuse me, douche with big balls has just been bailed out. [pushes wheelbarrow out of conference room]
geg6
Yawn. Simply the way America does business these days. Yes, it’s a giant Ponzi scheme. And when it all Madoffs, I, for one, will welcome our new Chinese overlords. But then, what do I know? I’m just a piece of shit. Just ask Koz. ;-)
Will
Hell, they crashed the world economy and came out stronger, richer and more untouchable than they’ve ever been. Why not do it again and again until they own everybody’s milkshake?
licensed to kill time
I read “re-remic” as “re-mimic” – kind of apt, actually.
Roger Moore
@scav:
FTW. I’m definitely going to have to remember that one.
hidflect
As I posted on MJ – The other dirty reason for scrabbling to get AAA rating, of course, is that pension funds and other similar organisations like charities are forbidden by law from investing in anything rated any less secure. There’s no other way to extract the cash from these most liquid of cash sources except to fraudulently misrepresent the risk.
SpotWeld
Don’t you just love it when the invisible hand of the free market snaps on a rubber glove and tells everyone to bend over.
General Winfield Stuck
this is what the repeal of Glass-Steagal caused starting in about 2000, along with his other bill that opened a humungus loophole to gamble with what turned out to be taypayer money in bailouts. If dems Obama don’t reinstate the separation between investment banking and the other banking, then will have failed and history will surely repeat itself.
**disclaimer.. since I barely know what I’m talking about when it comes to finance stuff, I pre-deny any knowledge of this comment if it is wrong.
General Winfield Stuck
his other bill = Phil Gramm
The Grand Panjandrum
Here we are a year past this fucking crash and Congress is still trying to decide what to do? Shocking … no one could have known. Why you would think the fix was in, or something. The Democrats are in charge now. How could it be that the banks are not yet nationalized and all the Wall Street types hanging from lamp posts or locked up in Gitmo? This really is shocking. These damn socia1ists can’t get anything right, can they?
Zifnab
@General Winfield Stuck: I wish I could say the repeal of Glass-Steagal started this mess, but let’s be real here. The SEC and the Treasury and all the other bureaucratic regulators and watchdogs have been bought off. They aren’t doing their jobs.
We turned the hen house over to the foxes. Surprise! All the chickens are dead again.
AkaDad
Congress can solve this problem with a few harshly-worded letters.
Fulcanelli
Mother Jones? Boy when you jump in John, you jump in with both feet. How’s that outrage meter doing since you became a LibTard? I chucked mine in the trash around the time of Iran-Contra.
They won’t stop until we stop ’em. I think we need a family intervention on Wall Street, as they clearly can’t help themselves and we all suffer with them. Dead Presidents are crack to these assholes.
Torch. Check.
Pitchfork. Check.
Waterboard. Check.
What are we waiting for, an invitation?
General Winfield Stuck
<blockquote, but let’s be real here. The SEC and the Treasury and all the other bureaucratic regulators and watchdogs have been bought off. They aren’t doing their jobs.
I agree that just about most regulation of business was suspended under Bush, but a lot of the derivative CDS stuff was made legal by Gramms follow up bill to the repeal of GS, which made un-taboo what was previously taboo. It will be hard to put the greed genie back in the bottle once the moneychangers have had their apatites whetted with no risk gambling of other peoples money, but putting back the basic guardrails would be a good and necessary first step to at least try.
r€nato
off-topic: Here’s a really tragic story about what happens sometimes when people make the irresponsible decision to get cancer.
Bullsmith
So the bankers steal more next time. To grossly oversimplify, crap like this is how Communism came along.
Andre
I don’t know, the American Police Force scam over at TPM, while it might involve less cash, seems even more ballsy. At least these companies are financial institutions (albeit not very good ones.)
joes527
Re-packaging bundled securities shouldn’t, in itself, cause any problems.
The fact that the same securities rebundled have a significantly different capital requirement tells us that the ratings are still totally useless.
The fact that the same securities rebundled have a significantly lower capital requirement tells us that the ratings agency are either significantly underrating anything old or significantly overrating anything new.
We are so screwed.
Fergus Wooster
@General Winfield Stuck:
I second the request for a new Glass-Steagall. While there were other factors at work in the collapse, right now you’re seeing big banks yet again taking massive positions in risky credits. The positions, and the size of the loan facilities, cannot be justified by any reasonable credit analysis (I know – working for a regional commercial bank, we and our peers balked).
When we asked how on earth they justified taking such a huge piece of an over-levered deal, they responded honestly – we can’t pass on the investment banking and capital markets fees.
The separation between commercial and investment banking is as necessary as ever.
Florida Cynic
The gap that needs to be closed here is the incentive that ratings agencies have to play nice with bankers. If I give an honest rating to a pile of shit, the bank goes down the street to someone else who’ll swear that the same pile of shit smells like roses. Since we need the ratings agencies (unless we set up a government entity that performs their functions with respect to bonds), the simple solution is to inject large criminal penalties, plainly spelled out, for folks who mislabel shit piles as heaps of roses.
Comrade Dread
Well, on the bright side when the Chinese eventually buy us out and install new management, they do tend to shoot jackasses like these guys.
r€nato
@Comrade Dread:
if we really did have some kind of socialism under Obama, the banks would have been nationalized and Bernie Madoff would have a lot more company from among his former social class.
r€nato
goddammit I forgot about the c ialis filter. Fuck.
p.a.
I don’t know how to respond rationally to this continuing contemptuous behavior. I don’t want to see people swinging from lightposts. I don’t want to live in a country where that happens. But if these people aren’t capable of feeling a little humility for what they have done, fear may be an acceptable substitute.
Splitting Image
I dunno. Wouldn’t it make more sense to nationalize the ratings agencies?
I suppose that comes with its own problems, but it seems to me that the issue is that the ratings agencies’ customers are the financial companies, and it’s good business to give your customers what they want.