S&P rated more than $2.8 trillion of residential mortgage-backed securities and about $1.2 trillion of CDOs from September 2004 through October 2007, according to the Justice Department complaint filed in federal court in Los Angeles.

At the height of the structured finance boom in 2007, McGraw-Hill reported record revenue of $6.77 billion, a 46 percent increase from 2001, with its financial services division responsible for 75 percent of operating income, Bloomberg data show. The stock price soared from $24.35 to as high as $72.50, with the 206 percent gain beating the S&P 500’s 58.4 percent rise.

When the U.S. housing boom collapsed, the world’s largest banks reported $2.1 trillion in losses and writedowns. Frozen credit markets triggered the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and cost 8.8 million people their jobs.

Securities that S&P and Moody’s rated AAA and helped Wall Street firms structure defaulted within months.

‘Key Enablers’

S&P, Moody’s and Fitch were “key enablers of the financial meltdown,” the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, created by Congress with a 10-member bipartisan board, said in its January 2011 report. “This crisis could not have happened without the rating agencies.”

The commission’s report also blamed the crisis on lenders’ irresponsible and sometimes fraudulent practices; regulators’ inattention and overconfidence; and the recklessness of borrowers and investors.

“The fact is that S&P’s ratings were based on the same subprime mortgage data available to the rest of the market -- including U.S. government officials who in 2007 publicly stated that problems in the subprime market appeared to be contained,” McGraw-Hill’s Feuchtwanger wrote in the e-mail.

The ratings business is starting to make a comeback, with corporate bond sales from the U.S. to Europe and Asia climbing 20.4 percent to a record $3.97 trillion last year, according to Bloomberg data. Yields on the debt from the most creditworthy to the riskiest borrowers plummeted to an all-time low of 3.24 percent on Dec. 28, according to the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Corporate & High Yield index.

‘His Heritage’