Somehow it would not come as a surprise if the entire lot of them were failing to tell the truth. I trust the rating agencies about as much as I trust the large accounting firms. And the banks? It's hard to have even less trust but they're obviously even less trustworthy. Until the government decides to make any of these organizations pay a price for lying one has to assume that they're all lying.
The New York attorney general has started an investigation of eight banks to determine whether they provided misleading information to rating agencies in order to inflate the grades of certain mortgage securities, according to two people with knowledge of the investigation.
The investigation parallels federal inquiries into the business practices of a broad range of financial companies in the years before the collapse of the housing market.
Where those investigations have focused on interactions between the banks and their clients who bought mortgage securities, this one expands the scope of scrutiny to the interplay between banks and the agencies that rate their securities.
