re: #406 lawhawk

Silver is eviscerating the S&P ratings through his statistical analysis. He’s pointing out the ways that the S&P has overstated the stability of paper issued by countries around the world, and has been out of step all along the way.

However, I’d love to see whether he’d do a similar analysis of Moody’s - I doubt it’s any better.

Fact is that all of the credit agencies are doing a poor job of assessing risk.

Agree.

In The Big Short (a great book!) Michael Lewis did a fine job explaining how the people at the rating agencies are consistently outgunned in dealing with their bank counterparts, and how they had little enthusiasm for the task anyway. Those institutions are fundamentally conflicted. I tend to think the government ought to get out of the business of designating them as semi-official scorekeepers.