Ending the Credit Rating Agency Racket

Stephen Moore Oct 09, 2018

This month marks the 10-year anniversary of the housing market meltdown that led to the Great Recession. Is another crisis looming around the corner?    Hopefully not, but it is worrisome that a decade later Washington is engaged in the same derelict behavior that caused the crisis. Government agencies are still issuing taxpayer guarantees on more than 90 percent of mortgages -- many with less than 5 percent down payments. Yikes.

Worse, the biggest conspirators in the meltdown, the duopolistic credit rating agencies Moody's and S&P, which gave sterling AAA grades on these bonds up nearly to the date they collapsed into financial rubble, are still dominating 80 percent of the credit rating market. Why are they even still in business?

Throughout 2007 and 2008, these agencies encouraged investors to snatch up hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities. They told investors these mortgages were "virtually risk-free" and stamped them with AAA ratings. Thanks to this incompetence, millions of Americans lost their life savings, and America suffered one of the greatest financial disasters in our history...........To Read More......