WASHINGTON -- As the housing market collapsed in late 2007, Moody's Investors Service, whose investment ratings were widely trusted, responded by purging analysts and executives who warned of trouble and promoting those who helped Wall Street plunge the country into its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
A McClatchy investigation has found that Moody's punished executives who questioned why the company was risking its reputation by putting its profits ahead of providing trustworthy ratings for investment offerings.
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Instead, Moody's promoted executives who headed its "structured finance" division, which assisted Wall Street in packaging loans into securities for sale to investors. It also stacked its compliance department with the people who awarded the highest ratings to pools of mortgages that soon were downgraded to junk. Such products have another name now: "toxic assets."
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"The story at Moody's doesn't start in 2007; it starts in 2000," said Mark Froeba, a Harvard-educated lawyer and senior vice president who joined Moody's structured finance group in 1997.
"This was a systematic and aggressive strategy to replace a culture that was very conservative, an accuracy-and-quality oriented (culture), a getting-the-rating-right kind of culture, with a culture that was supposed to be 'business-friendly,' but was consistently less likely to assign a rating that was tougher than our competitors," Froeba said.
After Froeba and others raised concerns that the methodology Moody's was using to rate investment offerings allowed the firm's profit interests to trump honest ratings, he and nine other outspoken critics in his group were "downsized" in December 2007.
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One Moody's executive who soared through the ranks during the boom years was Brian Clarkson, the guru of structured finance. He was promoted to company president just as the bottom fell out of the housing market.
Several former Moody's executives said he made subordinates fear they'd be fired if they didn't issue ratings that matched competitors' and helped preserve Moody's market share.
Froeba said his Moody's team manager would tell his team that he, the manager, would be fired if Moody's lost a single deal. "If your manager is saying that at meetings, what is he trying to tell you?" Froeba asked.
In the 1990s, Sylvain Raynes helped pioneer the rating of so-called exotic assets. He worked for Clarkson.
"In my days, I was pressured to do nothing, to not do my job," said Raynes, who left Moody's in 1997. "I saw in two instances -- two deals and a rental car deal -- manipulation of the rating process to the detriment of investors."
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One of the new top executives was Michael Kanef, who was experienced in assembling pools of residential mortgage-backed securities, but not in compliance, the division that was supposed to protect investors.
"What signal does it send when you put someone who ran the group that assigned some of the worst ratings in Moody's history in charge of preventing it from happening again," Froeba said of Kanef. Clarkson and Kanef, who remains at Moody's, were named in a class-action lawsuit alleging that Moody's misled investors about its independence from companies that paid it for ratings.
Kanef went after Scott McCleskey, the vice president of compliance at Moody's from the spring of 2006 until September 2008, and the man that Moody's said was the one to see for all compliance matters.
Read more:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2009/10/18/77244/how-moodys-sold-its-ratings-and.html#ixzz0urHO0Mhh
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