The feds are finally cracking down on ratings agencies. What took so long?

The feds are finally cracking down on ratings agencies. What took so long?

"It’s worth taking a step back to understand why the ratings agencies occupy such a crucial place in the financial landscape. And the real action happened during the creation of the private-label securitization market in the early 1980s, and during Alan Greenspan’s efforts to let the financial sector self-regulate its capital ratios in the late 1990s."

"To put that a different way, libertarians often argue that restaurant health codes are unnecessary because a restaurant would never want to poison their customers. As we’ve seen with Wall Street’s behavior, not only did they poison their customers, they took out life insurance on their customers when they did get sick. Wall Street trying to void future reps and warranties is the equivalent of a restaurant that had poisoned its customers hanging a sign that said “if you get sick here, you won’t get a refund.”"