Well, let’s see: the lexicon of ‘Colorful Financial Metaphors’
is now growing, yet again:
The Eisenhower corrections of the 50’s, yielded
‘Dogs’ for crappy stocks,
The three Great Stock Market Crashes from the
1000 level, culminating with the Crash of 72-74, so scared the sh_t out of the
Sheeple that 'Dogs’ was forever adopted in the common vernacular,
The Internet Bubble of 1997-2001 yielded, ‘Pigs’
and “Slap some lipstick on that Pig,”
Now in the following article, we learn that the
Great Housing Bubble has yielded ‘Cows’ as a metaphor for stupidly blind financial
analysts who were supposedly grading the credit worthiness of the ‘Junk’
Mortgage Bonds.
Now, I ask what?
What new, nifty and colorful metaphors will this entirely phony
Stock Market Rally be remembered for?
By the by, please remember: that we project that this completely PHONY Rally
that began with the Great Deception of 2012 will ABSOLUTELY explode with a
massively deceptive move to Dow Jones 18,500 in roughly the summer of 2015,
only to be followed with the ‘Mother of all Stock Market Crashes!!'
To see why
this will be so, read all our Blogs of late 2011 and early 2012 about the Great
Deception of 2012, which occurred right on schedule, we might add!
S&P Analyst Joked of Bringing Down the House Before Crash
By David McLaughlin
- Feb 5, 2013 4:54 PM ET
Standard & Poor’s employees joked about the company’s willingness to
rate deals “structured by cows” and sang and danced to a mock song inspired by
“Burning Down the House” before the 2008 global financial collapse, according
to a U.S.
government lawsuit.
Two S&P analysts in April 2007 discussed the company’s model for
collateralized debt obligations, with one messaging that a deal was
“ridiculous” and that S&P “should not be rating it,” according to the
complaint filed yesterday in federal court in Los Angeles.
Feb. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Floyd Abrams, a partner at Cahill Gordon
& Reindel LLP, talks about a U.S. Justice Department lawsuit against
McGraw-Hill Cos. and its Standard & Poor’s unit. The government alleges
that S&P knowingly understated the credit risks of bonds and derivatives
that were central to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
Abrams is an attorney representing S&P in the lawsuit. He speaks with Sara
Eisen on Bloomberg Television's "Lunch Money." (Source: Bloomberg)
“We
rate every deal,” the other replied, prosecutors said. “It could
be structured by cows and we would rate it.”
The analysts’ messages are among internal communications cited in the
Justice Department’s complaint against S&P and its parent, New York-based
McGraw-Hill Cos.
The U.S.
claims S&P, driven by a desire to increase revenue and market share,
defrauded investors as it issued ratings on mortgage products while ignoring
market risks. It rated more than $2.8 trillion of residential mortgage-backed
securities and about $1.2 trillion of collateralized-debt obligations from
September 2004 to October 2007, the government said.
A 2008 investigation into credit rating companies by the U.S. Securities and
Exchange Commission found that that the firms improperly managed conflicts and
weighed the risk of losing market share based on their ratings.
Ratings Report
The report on Moody’s Investors Service, S&P and Fitch Ratings cited the
discussion about the deal structured by “cows” and quoted an analyst who wrote
in an e-mail: “Let’s hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house
of cards falters.”
According to the U.S.
lawsuit, S&P in 2004 was considering a process for changing its rating
criteria and reached out to investors and issuers of mortgage securities for
their feedback. One executive questioned this practice, saying, “[W]e NEVER
poll them as to content or acceptability!”
Employees meanwhile were raising concerns about losing deals to competitors,
according to the complaint. One analyst in May 2004 wrote that the company was
losing a “huge” deal to a competitor because S&P was more conservative than
others, the government said.
“This is so significant that it could have an impact on future deals,” the
analyst wrote, according to the complaint. “There’s no way we can get back on
this one, but we need to address this now in preparation for future deals.”
Volume, Standards
In 2007, one CDO analyst wrote to a former co-worker: “Does company care
about deal volume or sound credit standards?”
E-mails and text messages can give prosecutors insight into the “unvarnished
perspective” of company insiders and help them win trials because they’re
easier for jurors to understand than more formal documents, said
Robert Mintz, a partner at McCarter & English.
“They tend to give jurors a flavor for the general atmosphere inside a
company, and that in connection with other documents can often be quite
damning,” said Mintz, a former federal prosecutor in New Jersey.
S&P said in a statement that the government’s lawsuit is “meritless” and
that at all times the company’s ratings “reflected our current best judgments”
about mortgage securities and CDOs.
“Unfortunately, S&P, like everyone else, did not predict the speed and
severity of the coming crisis and how credit quality would ultimately be
affected,” the company said.
‘Cherry-Picked’
The reference to a deal “structured by cows” had “nothing to do with RMBS or
CDO ratings or any S&P model,” it said, contradicting the complaint. RMBS
stands for residential mortgage-backed securities.
“The e-mail excerpts cherry-picked by DOJ have been taken out of context,
are contradicted by other evidence, and do not reflect our culture, integrity
or how we do business,” it said.
Beginning in the fall of 2006 and continuing to about the spring of 2007,
one executive regularly expressed frustration to colleagues that she was
prevented by other executives from downgrading ratings of subprime mortgage
securities because of concern that the company’s business would be affected,
the government said.
“This
market is a wildly spinning top which is going to end badly,” said another
executive in 2006, according to the complaint.
New Lyrics
In March 2007, an analyst wrote lyrics to the tune of “Burning Down the
House” by the rock group Talking Heads.
According to the complaint, it began:
“Watch out / Housing market went softer / Cooling down / Strong market is
now much weaker / Subprime is boi-ling o-ver / Bringing down the house.”
The government said the analyst later sent a video of himself singing and
dancing the first verse “before an audience of laughing S&P co-workers.”
