(Bloomberg News) Standard & Poor's is giving a higher rating to securities backed by subprime home loans, the same type of investments that led to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, than it assigns the U.S. government.
S&P is poised to provide AAA grades to 59 percent of Springleaf Mortgage Loan Trust 2011-1, a set of bonds tied to $497 million lent to homeowners with below-average credit scores and almost no equity in their properties. New York-based S&P stripped the U.S. of its top rank on Aug. 5, saying Washington politics were making the country less creditworthy.
Treasuries gained about 1.95 percent and U.S. borrowing costs have fallen to record lows as investors repudiated the downgrade, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch indexes. S&P has awarded AAAs to more than $36 billion of securities in the U.S. this year that were created by bankers who continue to gather thousands of loans, bundle them into bonds of varying risk and pay ratings firms a fee to assign credit rankings.
"Everybody has been led to believe over the years that AAA means AAA means AAA across the board," Gregory W. Smith, the general counsel for the $41 billion Public Employees' Retirement Association of Colorado, said in a telephone interview on Aug. 24. "Anybody that didn't learn in the 2008 crisis that doesn't apply should find another line of work."
Inflated Grades
Money managers are lending to the government at rates that, in some cases, are about a third of what they demand to hold top-rated mortgage notes, four months after Congressional investigators said S&P helped spur the longest economic contraction since the 1930s by assigning inflated grades to the bonds from 2005 through 2008.
More than 14,000 securitized bonds in the U.S. are rated AAA by S&P, backed by everything from houses and malls to auto- dealer loans and farm-equipment leases, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
S&P has said it made mistakes in structured finance since the crisis including misunderstanding cash flows and using conflicting methods to analyze the securities. Its owner, New York-based McGraw-Hill Cos., depended on credit ratings for 27 percent of its $6.19 billion of revenue last year, down from 33 percent of $6.77 billion in 2007, Bloomberg data show.
"These are errors that could cause airplanes to crash if this was aerospace engineering," said Sylvain Raynes, a principal at R&R Consulting in New York and a former analyst at Moody's Investors Service.
Senate Report
Securitization enabled by S&P contributed to more than $2 trillion in losses and writedowns at the world's largest financial institutions and the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. three years ago, causing credit markets to seize up and leading to the global recession.