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In charges filed late Monday in Los Angeles federal court, the Justice Department said S&P gave high marks to mortgage-backed securities that later went sour, even though it knew they were risky. The government said S&P misrepresented the risks because it wanted more business from the banks. The case is the government's first major action against one of the credit rating agencies that stamped their seals of approval on Wall Street's mortgage bundles. It marks a milestone for the Justice Department, which has been criticized for failing to make bigger cases against the companies involved in the crisis. "Put simply,...

I wrote Tuesday about the hypocrisy and perhaps vindictiveness of the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against ratings agency Standard & Poor’s for rating toxic mortgage-backed securities and their derivatives highly before the housing bubble popped. Apparently I wasn’t tough enough on … the DoJ. Bloomberg’s Jonathan Weil explains why the lawsuit isn’t just ill-considered, but downright silly: Oh, the poor suckers at Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp., fooled about the stench of their own garbage by those sneaky credit raters at Standard & Poor’s.The U.S. Justice Department made some peculiar allegations in its lawsuit this week against S&P...

A major credit-rating firm warned it could downgrade the U.S. if lawmakers prioritize debt payments over other government obligations such as Social Security, or fail to tackle the nation's growing debt burden in the ongoing budget negotiations. Fitch Ratings, one of the ratings firms that are closely watching the U.S. inch closer to its borrowing limit, unveiled two potential routes to a downgrade Tuesday, laying out their analysis more specifically than in prior reports. Analysts predict the U.S. will hit its so-called debt ceiling between Feb. 15 and March 1. Fitch's warning comes as President Barack Obama and Republican leaders...

PIMCO: 'THE US WILL GET DOWNGRADED' Rob WileOctober 18, 2012 PIMCO has seen enough of the federal government's "fiscal theatre" and now says the U.S.'s credit rating will inevitably be slashed, Bloomberg's Tracy Withers reports. “The U.S. will get downgraded, it’s a question of when,” Withers quotes Scott Mather, Pimco’s head of global portfolio management, as saying. “It depends on what the end of the year looks like, but it could be fairly soon after that.” If President Obama is reelected, Mather said, it's likely resolution of the country's deficit “doesn’t happen in a nice way, and we have disruption...

S&P Sounds Alarm On US, G20 Downgrades Antonia van de Velde, CNBC January 31, 2012 Concerns over the size of United States debt reared their head once again as ratings agency Standard & Poor’s warned that health care costs for a number of highly-rated Group of 20 countries, including the U.S., could hurt growth prospects and harm their sovereign creditworthiness from the middle of this decade. S&P downgraded the United States credit rating for the first time ever in August of last year. "Governments' fiscal burdens will increase significantly over the coming decade, with the highest deterioration in public finances...