Moody's Folds

Aha….

WASHINGTON — Bowing to growing concerns from municipal issuers, Moody’s Investors Service announced Wednesday that it will stop trying to get state and local issuers to agree to indemnify and hold it and its officers harmless for any mistakes they might make as a precondition to assigning ratings to municipal bond transactions.

I call BS on that.

What I think “convinced” them to drop it was this from my earlier Ticker on the subject:

Moody’s claimed, incidentally, that this language predated FinReg and was not a “response” to anything in there.  My retort is that it doesn’t matter – the issue isn’t insulation from the government withdrawing their “you can say anything without liability” shield (a shield that nobody else has in any other venue, incidentally), it is that such language destroys any claim of independent status, and thus also destroys the predicate upon which said “ratings” have value in the marketplace. 

Betcha.

Glad it’s gone, sad that they had to be called on it to figure out that you can’t be “independent” and “indemnified” for your own actions at the same time.

Disclosure: No position

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