ratings

"In light of the increasingly challenging economic and financial environment and fluid political developments in the euro area, Moody's is continuing to evaluate Italy's local and foreign currency bond ratings in the context of the risks identified. Moody's will strive to conclude the review within the next month."

Ladies and gents, it starts. Credit Agricole and BNP downgrades imminent.

“Equities in Dallas” was the worst job a trainee at Salomon brothers could get. I have to believe that the G-20 sovereign debt rating group was the equivalent at the rating agencies. It wasn’t volatile and sexy like Emerging Markets. It had nothing to do with the core business of rating corporate debt. It had even less to do with the fast growing structured product business. It must have been a pretty dull place to work. I think that is important because it means, certainly at this stage that all the decisions on sovereign debt are being made at a very high level within the rating agencies. Someone isn’t running some numbers and coming up with a rating proposal. Some people are sitting around in a room, trying to figure out what rating they want to give, or need to give, or can get away with giving. Knowing that these decisions are being made at the highest levels of the firm and have nothing to do with what any analyst in the area says or does is important in trying to figure out where the ratings go next.

What to make of this? My thoughts.

The farce is now complete, as the Chinese rating agency Dagong, which was the first one to downgrade the US, reminds the world it is there to lend its weight in destabilizing the ponzi house of cards. From Dow Jones: "Chinese ratings agency Dagong Global Credit Rating Co. said Monday it is putting Italy's sovereign debt on negative watch for a possible downgrade. The Italian government's debt accounts for 119% of gross domestic product, with most of the debt coming due in the next five years, Dagong said in a statement. Dagong has often issued controversial ratings. In November last year, it cut its rating on the U.S. to A+ from AA, with a negative outlook. It ranks the U.S. as a riskier borrower than China. Italian debt is in focus at the moment, as spreads between 10-year Italian and German bond yields reached a record 2.47 percentage points on Friday. Dagong said in its statement that it will downgrade Italian debt if the government's debt-financing costs continue to rise. "(Italy's) financing needs are huge each year, and the debt burden of the government will be seriously constrained by financing costs," Dagong said. Dagong gave Italy an A- rating with a negative outlook in June 2010." Who could have possibly thought that Italy's surging issuance load over the short term could be an issue. Oh wait... And yes, the irony that China, which as of this morning has telegraphed it is just as helpless in controlling the global liquidity implosion as everyone else, is downgrading another insolvent country is not lost on us. But yes, earlier Dagong did announce that that Moody's report on local government debt is "unfounded" and "vicious." Perhaps the most ironic thing is that the rating agencies got us here... And they will be those who get us out (courtesy of the escalating downgrades to the global reset ushering bottom).

Yesterday, the Italian government introduced additional fiscal austerity measures that aim to reduce the general government deficit by €47 billion (3% of 2011 GDP) by 2014. Despite these measures, however, we believe substantial downside risks to the government's debt-reduction plan remain, primarily due to Italy's weak growth prospects. in light of Italy's weak growth (per capita GDP growth averaged minus 0.9% between 2005 and 2011) it is our opinion that far more substantial microeconomic and macroeconomic reforms will be required to incentivize private investment and match wage levels with productivity. Without such measures, we believe Italy's economic potential will not be realized. This will imply insufficient wealth creation to deliver meaningful declines in the general government's debt-to-GDP ratio, which was a high 119% at end-2010. As a consequence, we continue to hold the view that there is an approximately one-in-three likelihood that the ratings on Italy could be lowered within the next 24 months, as reflected in our negative outlook.

It's disgusting. Ratings firms got off scot-free but are pensions desperately trying to deflect attention from their own fiduciary responsibility?

For some reason, much ado is being made about the nothing that is last night's 11th (or technically 10th) hour aversion of a government shutdown. As we pointed out last week, it is not as if this strawman outcome, or for that matter the raising of the debt ceiling was ever in doubt: "look for both of these events to be consistently spun as key positive outcomes, even though the chance of these things actually not transpiring in a non-favorable light is non-existent." And sure enough, we are confident that the spin of this outcome will be extremely bullish even if in reality it is the perpetuation of a baseline status quo, while the alternative would have been unthinkable. In the grand scheme of things, this was nothing more than a free episode of political soap opera. The markets largely shrugged, because the Treasury Department still would have been able to issue and service debt and the Fed would continues to goose markets higher courtesy of POMO. Yet as Reuters points out astutely: "The battle over the U.S. budget has ended. Now the war begins. The debate over this year's budget that took the U.S. government to within an hour of a shutdown is only a dress rehearsal for bigger spending clashes to come." Here is what to look forward to, as the beltway entertainment spigot is cranked out to the max.

"The downgrade reflects our view of the concluding statement of the European Council (EC) meeting of March 24-25, 2011, that confirms our previously published expectations that (i) sovereign debt restructuring is a possible pre-condition to borrowing from the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), and (ii) senior unsecured government debt will be subordinated to ESM loans. Both features are, in our view, detrimental to the commercial creditors of EU sovereign ESM borrowers." Shocking

Yesterday we reported that instead of manipulating home price data, China would simply stop reporting it. Fast forward to today and a few thousand miles west where we get a comparable report, only this time involving an insolvent continent and a comprehension-challenged rating agency. Just released from S&P: "Following new European Union regulations on credit ratings, we are converting our issuer credit ratings on these sovereigns and the ECB to "unsolicited", as we do not have rating agreements with the rated entities. Standard & Poor's  will nonetheless continue to rate the seven sovereigns and the ECB, and classify the ratings as unsolicited, as we believe that we have access to sufficient public information of reliable quality to support our analysis and ongoing surveillance, and because we believe there is significant market interest in these unsolicited ratings. Article 10 of EU Regulation 1060/2009, which addresses matters relating to the disclosure and presentation of credit ratings, requires, among other things, that unsolicited credit ratings be identified as such." In other words, Europe just told S&P, "Go fornicate yourself. We'll continue being broke while pretending to be solvent, and don't need you to spoil the party by being occasionally truthy..."

Moody's is taking a closer look at states' unfunded pension liabilities..

Banks, insurers and ratings agencies conspired to move junk assets that were guaranteed to implode - and implode they have. They were (Wall)Street hustling, 3 Card Monte style, but what most are dismissing is that the ponzi/hustle collapse has yet to truly happen!

There are several articles and studies around the finance industry that talk about the value of sell-side analyst ratings or the lack thereof. Most of the studies provide a negative view of the accuracy of ratings from sell-side analysts and bring to light the many potential problems associated with sell-side analysts and their ratings including conflicts of interest with the firms that employ them as well as their tendency to appease management teams who provide them with information not available to the public by providing favorable ratings for those firms. Some other problems associated with sell-side analyst ratings include: 1) Buy recommendations outnumber sell recommendations some speculate for the purpose of making management happy. 2) Analysts often downgrade firms after negative news has already hit public eyes. 3) Unable to purchase the stocks that they cover, no “skin in the game” 4) Analysts often find comfort in being a part of the majority and often times fall victim to groupthink. 5) Compensation analyst’s receive has been found to be tied to the investment banking business the analyst generates.

Another day, another SEC farce. Today, Schapiro's captured henchmen sent a notice to credit rating agencies about internal conduct and methods the firms use to determine the riskiness of financial products. As the alternative was to pursue a fraud enforcement action, in this particular case against Mark Zandi's Moody's, one can see why the SEC opted out for the action that would not implicitly open it up as well to like legal treatment by millions of investors, who had kinda, sorta hoped that the SEC would not allow this kind of fraud in the first place. As Housing Wire reports, "the SEC announcement stems from an inquiry by its enforcement division into whether Moody's Investors Service violated registration provisions or anti-fraud provisions of federal securities laws." Additionally, "the commission notes that Dodd-Frank gives federal district courts jurisdiction over SEC enforcement actions that allege violations of the anti-fraud provisions of the securities laws." In other words, while the SEC is a toothless, gutless, corrupt POS, others may take offense to this lack of responsible action and sue Moody's directly. And what is the reason for the SEC investigation? Why, a computer "glitch", which "inadvertently" raised the ratings of various notes by up to 3.5 notches! Housing Wire notes: "The SEC inquiry stems from allegations that a Moody's computer coding
error improved, "by 1.5 to 3.5 notches," the credit ratings for certain
debt obligation notes." Yet having been caught with its pants down was not enough for Moody's to actually fix the "glitch" - "shortly thereafter during a
meeting in Europe, a Moody's rating committee voted against taking
responsive rating action, in part because of concerns that doing so
would negatively impact Moody's business reputation." And people are surprised that wholesale market manipulation occurs on a day to day basis, with the ongoing blessing of the SEC...

Now that sovereign CDS (and ratings) are back in vogue with everyone finally expecting the world to relapse into a double dip, Zero Hedge has compiled Moody's sovereign ratings and spread these alongside the CDS levels in any given bucket to propose several trade ideas taking advantage of Moody's market lagging inefficiency.