Quotes About Rating agencies

did an excellent job of discussing how Speaker Paul Ryan used his position to force additional votes for the PROMESA legislation. Forcing legislation that would cause innocent bond holders to take massive losses while the rating agencies and banks walked away from this

Imagine the big rating agencies as three competitive saloons standing side by side, with each free to set its own drinking age. Before long, nine-year-olds would be downing bourbon

The rating agencies historically actually did a pretty good job rating regular bonds.

The rating agencies, who were paid fat fees by Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms for each deal they rated, pronounced 80 percent of the new tower of debt triple-A.

The more egregious the rating agencies' mistakes, the bigger the opportunity for the Wall Street trading desks. In

As the bonds were all priced off the Moody's rating, the most overpriced bonds were the bonds that had been most ineptly rated. And the bonds that had been most ineptly rated were the bonds that Wall Street firms had tricked the rating agencies into rating most ineptly.

He explained that the rating agencies were morally bankrupt and living in fear of becoming actually bankrupt.

For most of the period of the boom, only Moody's, Standard & Poor's and Fitch were recognized by the SEC. It was not the particular choices of rating-agencies selected by the SEC that is in question but the policy of giving those agencies a captive market.

Debt, we've learned, is the match that lights the fire of every crisis. Every crisis has its own set of villains - pick your favorite: bankers, regulators, central bankers, politicians, overzealous consumers, credit rating agencies - but all require one similar ingredient to create a true crisis: too much leverage.