The Liberty Papers

Okay, that’s not true. But it’s no different than this:

Prosecutors Ask if 8 Banks Duped Rating Agencies

Wall Street played a crucial role in the mortgage market’s path to collapse. Investment banks bundled mortgage loans into securities and then often rebundled those securities one or two more times. Those securities were given high ratings and sold to investors, who have since lost billions of dollars on them.

…

At Goldman, there was even a phrase for the way bankers put together mortgage securities. The practice was known as “ratings arbitrage,” according to former workers. The idea was to find ways to put the very worst bonds into a deal for a given rating. The cheaper the bonds, the greater the profit to the bank.

The rating agencies may have facilitated the banks’ actions by publishing their rating models on their corporate Web sites. The agencies argued that being open about their models offered transparency to investors.

But several former agency workers said the practice put too much power in the bankers’ hands. “The models were posted for bankers who develop C.D.O.’s to be able to reverse engineer C.D.O.’s to a certain rating,” one former rating agency employee said in an interview, referring to collateralized debt obligations.

I just finished reading Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, and it’s pretty clear that the banks knew enough about the rating agencies’ models to pretty successfully turn shit into shinola. In fact, the agencies made enough of their ratings models public to make it absolutely certain that the banks would game the system. Not *dupe* the rating agencies, mind you, because the ratings agencies were willing partners.

But I thought about it a little bit more, and I was struck by another thought.

The Democratic house leadership wanted to cost projection of the healthcare bill to come in within a certain number. So what did they do? They duped gamed the CBO rating system to ensure that the bill they wrote would have the price tag they wanted it to have. The CBO is a respected and non-partisan office, but they’re asked only to score what legislators give them, NOT what they think the legislators will do in other bills immediately or a few years down the line.

Essentially both the Wall Street banks and Congressional leadership did the same thing: they were teaching to the test. They knew specifically what was needed in order to generate a favorable outcome from the “test”, and they made sure they did exactly what they wanted, but in such a way that got the right score.

So who’s going to prosecute the Democratic leadership when this healthcare bill inevitably costs the American people more than they advertised?