Monday, September 27, 2010

Spreading Toxins: Now the Bond-Raters

We all knew that there were .....ahhh......"problems" with mortgages.

How many?

“According to testimony last week, from January 2006 to June 2007, Clayton reviewed 911,000 loans for 23 investment or commercial banks, including Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, UBS, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns and Morgan Stanley.

The statistics provided by these samples, according to Mr. Johnson and Vicki Beal, a senior vice president at Clayton who also testified before the inquiry commission, indicated that only 54 percent of the loans met the lenders’ underwriting standards, regardless of how stringent or weak they were.

Some 28 percent of the loans sampled over the period were outright failures — that is, they were unable to meet numerous underwriting standards and did not have positive factors that compensated for their failings. And yet, 39 percent of these troubled loans still went into mortgage pools sold to investors during the period, Clayton’s figures showed.”

--Ritholtz, quoting the NYT

The article has to do with what appears to be complicity on the part of the bond-raters: Moody's, S&P, and Fitch.

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