Scheiße Buchstaben (CMBS) Scandal: Standard & Poor’s Deal With Satan Remains in Effect

Standard and Poor's Wheel of Corrupt Ratings

Standard & Poor’s upgraded several commercial mortgage backed securities (a.k.a. CMBS, or internationally, Scheiße Buchstaben) to a triple-A rating just one week after downgrading those same Scheiße Buchstaben to junk or near-junk status of double-B and triple-B minus. Banks holding the downgraded Scheiße have a hard time qualifying for a form of Bank Welfare known as TALF. Now that the Scheiße Buchstaben have been upgraded they are again eligible for Bank Welfare. For more, see (The Financial Times blog). (Editor’s note: “AAA” is the new “BB-”.)

So what are debt ratings are good for?

• Training wheels for institutional investors incapable of making sound independent investment decisions.

• Papering the file and covering your ass for when the indefensible piece of shit you sold to the public inevitably craters.

• When raised or lowered, debt ratings often provide helpful reminders of historical public securities market activity that you might have overlooked months ago.

• Excellent indicators of who is paying the most money to rating agencies and who they are afraid of being sued by when debt ratings remain rock solid right up to the very moment of the issuer’s insolvency.

• It’s how the biggest whores on Wall Street make a living.

Glacier Global Website ‘Coming Soon’ For Third Straight Year

The Glacier Global Partners web site has been “Coming Soon” for three years going on now. This may give creditors something idea to expect when the troubled investment company tells that the invoice will be paid “soon”.

Glacier Global website has been "Coming Soon" for three years going on

If writing a simple web page is so difficult, does that mean you’re a nitwit? Well, yes, I’m afraid it does! Here’s what you’re saying:

• We are not finished and have nothing of value on this page.
• We have a great vision that one day this page will actually be finished and complete. Please share our delusion.
• We haven’t really come to terms with the web as an extremely fluid and dynamic information technology.
• Interfacing to new technologies is a really big effort for us.
• We have a persistent fantasy about being able to eloquently express exactly who we are with this web page. Until that comes to fruition, please view our lack of expressive power as merely a temporary phenomenon.

You’re fortunate to have helgabluth to pick up the slack for you.

More here.

Of course it was fraud

Financial crisis: Maybe it was fraud after all

Oct 13th 2010, 19:06 by M.S.

BACK when the global financial crisis first broke, there was a lot of debate over whether blame should be assigned to deliberate fraud by financial-industry actors, or whether the whole phenomenon was simply an unfortunate catastrophe based on systemic miscalculations. General opinion settled on the unfortunate-catastrophe thesis. But Felix Salmon writes about one area in which fraud may in fact have played a substantial role, by deceiving the investors who ultimately purchased mortgage-backed securities. “There’s a pretty strong case,” Mr Salmon writes, that banks that put together mortgage-backed securities “lied to the investors in many if not most of these deals.” He focuses on Clayton Holdings, a company which performed due diligence on some 70% of the mortgages packaged into bonds by banks, checking them to see whether they in fact conformed to the standards the banks represented to investors.

More here.

We Need More of This

Bear Stearns honchos arrested, but their willing minions remain free to prey on society.

Two former Bear Stearns managers were arrested on charges linked to the collapse of a hedge fund that bet heavily on subprime mortgages before the market collapsed, federal authorities said.

Y-Bum

Has anything changed since then? “A revolution without firing squads is meaningless.”

“My work is done here,” said Yaniv Blumenfeld.

FBI agents escort handcuffed Bear Stearns hedge fund managers

More here.