Nader’s warnings to rating agencies
Via onthewilderside.com
Published at Nader.org
Ralph Nader ran for President with the Green Party, and more recently as an independent candidate. Below is an excerpt from a 7/28/2011 post at Nader’s nonpartisan website. It is an Open Letter he wrote to the heads of Standard and Poor’s, Moody’s Corp, and Fitch’s Ratings:
Now your lobbyists are pressing members of Congress to weaken further the provisions affecting rating agencies in the Dodd-Frank law in ways that will raise the risk-consequences for the savings and investments of innocent people. See the strong critique of your looming downgrade by arch-conservative columnist Holman W. Jenkins in the January 27, 2011 Wall Street Journal titled, “Who Elected the Rating Agencies?” Mr. Jenkins wrote that not only are your caveats overblown, but he concluded that, “it is foppish in the extreme of S&P to imagine its opinion is needed or valued, and one more reason to expedite a rare useful provision of Dodd-Frank – it’s requirement that federal law be purged of language requiring investors to act on the opinions of rating agencies.”…