Via Barry Ritholtz. This should be fun.
CalPERS: Rating Agencies to Blame for Huge Losses
Way back when, I mentioned there was a surprise coming S&P’s way. Since it is now out there officially, I can discuss it publicly.
After the brouhaha with McGraw Hill began, I was contacted by numerous people — mostly readers emailing words of support. But a few West Coast lawyer types seemed to be asking lots of questions, and revealing little.
I poked around with some law firms in California, and started to pick up the rumor that California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) was going to drop the bomb on S&P, Moody’s and Fitch. No one would say anything on the record, but it was clear that litigation was being considered as an option against the Ratings Agencies.
Here is the money quote:
The AAA ratings given by the agencies “proved to be wildly inaccurate and unreasonably high,” according to the suit, which also said that the methods used by the rating agencies to assess these packages of securities “were seriously flawed in conception and incompetently applied…”
“The ratings agencies no longer played a passive role but would help the arrangers structure their deals so that they could rate them as highly as possible,” according to the CalPERS suit.
Now, here comes the fun part: CalPERS doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the money. Sure, the financial instruments at hand (Cheyne Finance, Stanfield Victoria Funding and Sigma Finance) have defaulted on their payment obligations. The losses to Calpers are ~$1 billion.
But that’s not what’s going on here: These Left Coasters want their pound of flesh. They don’t care for the Ratings Agency folks, and consider them a blight on the investment landscape.
The goal of the litigation (as I see it) isn’t to make the rating agencies pay a financial penalty; rather, it is to publicly try them just as the regulatory rules are being rewritten. I also predict that CalPERS is going to attempt to not just win, but humiliate these agencies, call them out in the most embarrassing way possible, trash the senior executives, and make things very uncomfortable in general for these firms.
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