Commentaries

Looks like at least one heavyweight pension fund, Calpers, is taking the much maligned ratings firms Moody’s Investors Service, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch to court for their role in making investors feel warm and fuzzy about complex financial instruments that it turns out no one really understood.

New York Times reports that Calpers is blaming about $1 billion in losses on “wildly inaccurate” ratings applied to securities that included those backed by subprime mortgages.

This about sums it up:

The AAA ratings given by the agencies “proved to be wildly inaccurate and unreasonably high,” according to the suit, which also said that the methods used by the rating agencies to assess these packages of securities “were seriously flawed in conception and incompetently applied.”

The SEC has tapped a team of examiners to monitor the agencies and will also take a look at the rating agencies business model, which has come under fire since the debt issuers, not investors, pay the firms for their services.  But for those who lost billions on these toxic securities, this is likely to be viewed as too little, too late.