Journal: Moody’s Loss of Integrity

Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Ethics, Methods & Process
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How Moody's sold its ratings – and sold out investors

Kevin G. Hall

McClatchy Newspapers

October 21, 2009

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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“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.

Phi Beta Iota: INTEGRITY is EVERYTHING.  See Paradigms of Failure.

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