The poor standards of Standard and Poors

There was a bit of brouhaha on Monday when the credit ratings agency Standard & Poors talked of a one-in-three chance that US Treasury securities could be downgraded by the company to "negative" in three years. The warnings were based on projections of federal deficits and were welcomed by many in the punditry, in politics and in the financial sector who want to make deficits the centerpiece of any immediate economic agenda.

But one wonders how much credence should be given to Standard and Poors?  How much of what they publish is tailored to what Wall Street wants to hear and carefully aligned in their immediate interests?

The Congressional Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission has judged S&P and the other ratings agencies as key players in the big stakes deceptions and fundamentally fraudulent mortgage bundling that was at the center of the 2008 financial meltdown. For example, last fall, via the New York Times reporting of the Crisis Inquiry hearings, we learned this:

D. Keith Johnson, a former president of Clayton Holdings, a company that analyzed mortgage pools for the Wall Street firms that sold them, told the commission on Thursday that almost half the mortgages Clayton sampled from the beginning of 2006 through June 2007 failed to meet crucial quality benchmarks that banks had promised to investors.
Yet, Clayton found, Wall Street was placing many of the troubled loans into bundles known as mortgage securities.

Mr. Johnson said he took this data to officials at Standard & Poor’s, Fitch Ratings and to the executive team at Moody’s Investors Service.

“We went to the ratings agencies and said, ‘Wouldn’t this information be great for you to have as you assign tranche levels of risk?’ ” Mr. Johnson testified last week. But none of the agencies took him up on his offer, he said, indicating that it was against their business interests to be too critical of Wall Street.

So anything coming from Standard and Poors needs to be taken with some very large grains of salt. In this vein, emeritus Amherst economics professor Richard Wolff, in an article for the UK Guardian, called the S&P warning,"another scary instalment in the conservative campaign to justify cutting government social spending. S&P may be rampant in its interests, but it hardly seems conflicted about them." 

Simon Johnson, former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund, also had some appropriately skeptical comments on S&P's pronouncements at the NYT's Economix blog:

It is commendable that S.&P. now wants to talk about the United States fiscal deficit –- one wonders where it was, for example last year, during the debate about extending the Bush-era tax cuts.