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Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Tighten Rules, Create Loopholes

On Sunday we looked at how Moody's fired employees that wanted to bring out information on the upcoming recession. This was in the recent past.

(Click this link - With Us Or Against Us - and that article will appear below this one.)

Instead the company wanted to maintain the status quo and pretend all was well, or as they now say, going along swimmingly.

Not so of course, and legislation is being passed to help rectify this problem, except it has loopholes that don't really address these corporate cultural tendencies. Improvements to the legislation are needed. So does Congress have the spine to stand up to the big dogs.

McClatchy: Bill to tighten rules on ratings agencies has big loopholes
...as it's now written it fails to address many of the credit-rating agency missteps that helped fuel the global financial crisis.

The measure would require greater transparency from the three major bond-rating agencies — Moody's Investors Service, Standard & Poor's and Fitch Ratings — about the methods they use in rating bonds.

3 comments:

Glynn Kalara said...

The people that own these companies are f*cking criminals and worse cowards! They set their employees up to go out and do illegal shit and then when their caught throw them to the wolves and deny everything. The rating agencies played a HUGE part in the collapse because they essentially vacated their role as honest brokers. They essentially took huge fees to allow companies to put forth fraudulent numbers. Lots of people bought & sold all kinds of bogus products based on the reliability and veracity of the agencies ratings. That the Gov't has allowed this to go unpunished is itself a crime and an abrogation of their jobs. The whole corrupt circle needs to be flushed. I'm really disappointed /disgusted that the Obama admin. has done little or nothing to these companies. It seems in some depts. nothing has changed in DC. I'd advise Obama to GET RID of Tim Geitner and Larry SUMMERS already these two are obviously nothing more then INDUSTRY SHILLS.

Jim Sande said...

Yes, this was and is very egregious activity. It would be worth investigating to find out how many people lost retirement money, and how much money, not to mention regular people losing for any reason.

Bernie Madoff goes to jail, but the government gently steps around Moody's yet they essentially did the same thing, right. They knowingly swindled money. Moody's does it because it keeps corporate cronies happy, so nothing happens to them. They get regulations with loopholes the size of stacks of money.

Glynn Kalara said...

It's pretty obvious who runs DC and which rule the game is now played by. The men in charge are the men with sacks of gold AKA Goldman Sachs and the only rule worth spit anymore in DC is the "golden rule" Those with the gold make the rules!