This story slipped through last week, un-noticed by CNBC and other useless financial media vomit trenches.
Fraud? You must be kidding. There's no prosecutable fraud on Wall Street.
---
Morgan Stanley successfully pushed Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s Investors Service Inc. to give unwarranted investment-grade ratings in 2006 to $23 billion worth of notes backed by subprime mortgages, investors claimed in a lawsuit, citing documents unsealed in federal court.
According to the plaintiffs, the documents reveal that what the ratings companies describe as independent judgments were actually unsupported by evidence and written in collaboration with the bank that was packaging the securities. Morgan Stanley and the ratings companies deny the allegations.
“All of us were under instructions to rate everything that we could bring in the door, and they were measuring market share on a monthly basis,” Frank Raiter, a former analyst of residential-mortgage bonds at S&P, said in a deposition, according to the documents. “I wasn’t real confident we were doing a very good job at it.”