Ratings Agencies Ignored Bad Loans

As the mortgage market was showing signs of failure in 2006, leading to the housing bubble that triggered the economic recession in 2008, ratings agencies deliberately ignored strong evidence that many of the loans were unsafe, according to testimony given last week to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. D. Keith Johnson, former president of Clayton Holdings—a company that analyzed mortgage pools for the Wall Street firms that sold them—told the commission that from January 2006 to June 2007, Clayton reviewed 911,000 loans for 23 investment or commercial banks, including Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, and others, and found that not only were these banks placing the faulty loans into bundles known as mortgage securities, but nearly half failed to meet quality-control standards. Johnson took the data to officials at S&P, Fitch Ratings, and Moody's, to no avail. "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?'" Johnson testified. But if "any one of them would have adopted it, they would have lost market share."