Moody’s Investors Service and the Illinois pension liability/ the video segment of Ty Fahner talking about compelling Bond Rating Agencies to lower Illinois' ratings/ U.S. Government slams rating agency with $5 billion fraud lawsuit

From the USA Today, September 6, 2014:

“Illinois' pension liability as a percentage of state revenue is far and away the nation's highest, a major credit-rating agency says in a new report. Moody's Investors Service reported that the state's three-year average liability over revenue is 258%...” (Moody's: Illinois pension debt vs.revenue is worst).

Do you remember the video segment of Ty Fahner talking about compelling Bond Rating Agencies to lower Illinois' ratings? 
 

Fahner: “The Civic Committee, not me, but me and some of the people that make up the Civic Committee… did meet with and call – in one case in person – and a couple of calls to Moody’s and Fitch and Standard & Poor's, and say, 'How in the hell can you guys do this? ...You're an enabler to let the state continue. You keep threatening more and more and more.' And I think now we backed off because we don't want to be the straw that breaks the back. But if you watched what happened over the last few years, it's been steadily down... We have told [the Bond Rating Agencies] that they are being irresponsible..." Click Here for the two-minute video.

U.S. Government slams rating agency with $5 billion fraud lawsuit:

“Earlier this year [February 5, 2013], the Justice Department filed a $5 billion lawsuit against Standard & Poor's -- one of the nation's Big Three credit rating agencies, which also include Moody's and Fitch. The lawsuit accuses S&P of knowingly giving AAA ratings to financial products the agency's analysts understood to be unworthy.

“Handing out sparkling ratings to deeply flawed securities represents a serious breach of trust on the part of a credit rating agency. But it was common practice for the Big Three. And in no small way, this practice enabled the financial meltdown of 2008.

“Under the current so-called ‘issuer pays’ model, agencies are paid by the Wall Street firms whose products they are rating. The agencies thus have a financial motive to satisfy issuers with a high rating: If an agency declines to give a particular product its seal of approval, the issuer can simply take its business -- and its fees -- elsewhere.

“In the lead-up to the financial crisis, [Moody’s Investors Service, Fitch Ratings and Standard & Poor’s] gave out AAA ratings to sub-prime mortgage-backed securities. The securities, of course, turned out to be toxic, but the agencies were paid anyway.

“What's worse, when Wall Street ran out of questionable mortgages to securitize, it created a whole new market based on bets on those securities, bets called ‘derivatives.’ The Big Three kept on handing out AAA ratings to these complicated new products, and were again paid handsomely to do so.

“The rating agencies made hundreds of millions of dollars, but in the end, it was American taxpayers who paid the price -- losing their savings, their homes and their jobs in addition to having to pay billions to bail out banks.

“In the wake of that catastrophe, there is bipartisan agreement that the credit ratings process needs serious reform. That is why we worked together on an amendment to the Dodd-Frank financial reform law -- and why the Franken-Wicker provision passed with bipartisan support…”

SEC must ride herd on credit rating agencies by Al Franken and Roger Wicker