Actually, the Wall Street Journal was pretty slow to pick up this story about rating agencies, a story which was out there waiting for some skeptical attention for several years. The Financial Times had it earlier and surely more critically. Moreover, the WSJ is still fronting for the insurers, MBI and Ambac, that go to work right after they have the false documentation in hand. (Here, I am obliged to tell you that I have a short position in both of these securities.) Last week, I posted about a slavish interview they tan with MBI's historically deceitful CEO.
Now, of course, there's the corrective essay in Thursday's WSJ by the CEO of Lazard to which I call attention below.
And here in Friday's Journal is a simply devastating analysis by Aaron Lucchetti of how Moody's led everybody -- or almost everybody -- down to the tsunami waters. The details of Moody's intimate complicity with its ostensibly arms-length clients are detailed in the Journal and much more are presumably available to the feds, and I hope some obsessive U.S. district attorneys are right now examining them.
By the way, there are several more tsunamis to come.