Word: aaas
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...like Lehman, was ultimately done in by credit-rating agencies, of all things. The main credit raters - Moody's and Standard & Poor's - had blithely assigned top-drawer AAA and AA ratings to all sorts of hinky mortgage securities and other financial esoterica without understanding the risks involved. Would you know how to rate a collateralized loan obligation? Or commercial-mortgage-backed securities? Sophisticated investors took Moody's and S&P's word for it, and it turned out that the agencies didn't know what they were doing. Credit raters, who claim to offer only opinions, are party...
Then there's the nonsense that ratings agencies shoveled out about the risk levels of collaterized debt obligations (CDOs), how this new bit of financial wizardry deserved AAA and AA designations even though it rested partly on a foundation of subprime mortgages. It was all justified by super-sophisticated models - way too sophisticated for "you" to understand - that looked back at real estate pricing and foreclosures and couldn't conjure a scenario in which the holders of the most senior parts of these tranches wouldn't get paid...
...When all the indicators went bad - delinquencies and interest rates up, home prices down - the agencies started yanking the ratings on CDOs by the carload. As the number of subprime delinquencies started to climb, and the magic mark-to-model accounting that the investment houses used to value their AAA and AA CDOs got market-tested - as in, "What will you give me for this piece of paper?" - the game was over...
...Congress is on vacation, and they're probably soaking up the rays somewhere. We're soaking up high gas prices.' ASHLEY TYRRELL, a 26-year-old Kansan, on why she isn't traveling this Labor Day. AAA predicts the biggest decline in Labor Day travelers in eight years...
...city, including a new medical school that Doherty says will employ 1,000 people. The city web site boasts about recent infusions into its downtown from companies like drug maker Sanofi Pasteur, which now occupies space in a former Woolworth department store. Last year, the Yankees moved its AAA farm team here from Columbus, Ohio; in May, Money magazine named Scranton one of the ten fastest-growing real estate markets in the country. This growth is proof of Doherty's mantra: If you make it nice, they will come. The mayor and other local leaders have funneled millions of dollars...