Saturday, October 03, 2009

Negligence, Not Fraud

That's the opinion of Paul Kanjorski, head of the House Financial Subcommittee on Capital Markets, after hearing the testimony of a couple of Moody's ex-employees. He may very well be correct. But does that mean we should forget about the role Moody's and other ratings agencies played in bringing our economy to this point?

Merriam-Webster defines negligence as failure to exercise the care that a reasonably prudent person would exercise in like circumstances. One would expect that a company that purports to rate securities should be reasonably prudent. Clearly, Moody's was not. Were they being prudent in replacing their chief compliance officer with the manager responsible for rating mortgage-backed securities?

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