CDOs

Ratings Arbitrage - Letting the Credit Ratings Agencies off the Hook

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An amendment just passed the Senate which allows regulators to assign a credit rating agency to evaluate asset based securities. To date, the ones hiring the credit rating agencies are the ones making up these fictional derivatives.

That said, we have this New York Times article reporting more investigations of banks, but this time trying to find evidence the poor little ole' credit ratings agencies were just played as suckers by the banks (cough, cough):

The New York attorney general has started an investigation of eight banks to determine whether they provided misleading information to rating agencies in order to inflate the grades of certain mortgage securities, according to two people with knowledge of the investigation.

Since ratings models were available to the ones creating the structured finance product, in this case, credit default obligations (CDOs), issuing firms could analyze the ratings methods to figure out where to hide the toxic, worthless crud contained within, yet still land a AAA rating.

Speaking of Stuffing CDOs with Toxic Waste - Investors Sue Morgan Stanley Over CDOs

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While we were just chatting about how to stuff a CDO with toxic waste, speak of the devil, someone is suing trying to get their money back.

Morgan Stanley is being sued over a $1.2 billion worth of defaulted CDOs.

Morgan Stanley (MS.N) has been sued by a Virgin Islands pension fund that accused the Wall Street bank of defrauding investors by marketing $1.2 billion of risky mortgage-related notes that it expected to fail.

The lawsuit filed December 24 in Manhattan federal court said Morgan Stanley collaborated with credit rating agencies Moody's Investors Service and Standard & Poor's to obtain "triple-A" ratings for notes marketed in 2007 as part of a collateralized debt obligation (CDO) known as Libertas.

More AIG Being a "Funnel" of U.S. Taxpayer Money to Banks

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The Zero Hegdge blog has quite the bombshell story, a trader anonymously spilled the beans on AIG being used as a funnel for U.S. taxpayer money to other banks. In layman's terms:

For those to whom this is merely a lot of mumbo-jumbo, let me explain in layman's terms:
AIG, knowing it would need to ask for much more capital from the Treasury imminently, decided to throw in the towel, and gifted major bank counter-parties with trades which were egregiously profitable to the banks, and even more egregiously money losing to the U.S. taxpayers, who had to dump more and more cash into AIG, without having the U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner disclose the real extent of this, for lack of a better word, fraudulent scam.

Go to Zero Hedge in link for the technical trading details of the post.