Quotes About Standard & Poor's

The S&P 500 Index originally contained exactly 425 industrial, 25 rail, and 50 utility firms, but these groupings were abandoned in 1988 in order to maintain, as Standard & Poor's claimed, an index that included "500 leading companies in leading industries of the economy.

Another huge toll has been taken by taxes. Passively managed index funds are tax-efficient, given the low turnover implicit in the structure of the Standard & Poor's 500 Index (and, to an even greater extent, the all-market Wilshire 5000 Index).

And in 2006, just before the financial system began to collapse, an analyst from Standard & Poor's, a credit-rating agency that consistently and knowingly gave the highest ratings to near-worthless mortgage-backed securities, said in an internal e-mail, "Let's hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters.

At the ratings agency Standard & Poor's, where they've knowingly mispriced risk, one guy messages another: 'Let's hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters,' adding the emoticon ':O)'.