Category: Rating agencies

Remixing REMICS, or shake your booty

8 October, 2009 (11:09) | Capital markets, Innovations, REMICs, Rating agencies, Securitization, Subprime, US News | No comments

By: David A. Smith
 
If no one wants your pile of booty, perhaps you should try shaking things up  At first blush, that appears to be the strategy behind the proposed remixing of Real Estate Mortgage Investment Conduits (REMICs), as presented in a recent Wall Street Journal article:
 

I’m gonna shake it up
 
Once upon a time, [...]

Nothing to see here: Part 3, churning CFOs

4 June, 2008 (09:07) | Capital markets, Government, Rating agencies, Securitization, US News | No comments

[Continued from the previous Part 2 and Part 1.]

So far, in exploring how failure to report leads to reporting failure, we’ve used this New York Times article about now-bankrupt New Century, its unlucky auditor, and its troubled but unmoving directors.  By the end of 2006, when new CFO Tajvinder S. Bindra was quizzing his [...]

Nothing to see here: Part 2, … means reporting failure

3 June, 2008 (08:08) | Capital markets, Governance, Rating agencies, Securitization, US News | No comments

[Continued from yesterday's Part 1.]
In yesterday’s Part 1 on whether auditors in the subprime mess, in addition to the rating agencies, are culpable for bad information prepared by their clients the subprime loan originators, we looked at this New York Times article about unlucky auditor KMPG and its now-bankrupt client New Century:  
At the [...]

Nothing to see here: Part 1, Failure to report …

2 June, 2008 (09:12) | Capital markets, Governance, Rating agencies, Securitization, US News | No comments

If you can’t report the news on time, the news you eventually report is almost always bad.  I formulated this theory in 1977, and it’s served me well ever since.

It was a time of tight jeans and floppy hair
 
As the subprime mess reaches saturation of troubled borrowers and dissipates into tardy omnibus rescue legislation [...]

Negotiating your rating: Part 3, the circumstantial evidence

25 April, 2008 (09:52) | Finance markets, Rating agencies, Subprime, Theory, US News | No comments

[Continued from the previous Part 1 and Part 2.]
 

For the previous two days, we’ve been delving into whether, as implied by a Wall Street Journal article on the rating agencies, Moody’s got so cozy with the issuers it was rating, and who were paying its fees, that it succumbed to grade inflation.
 
 [For background on the [...]