Sunday, September 23, 2007

Greenspan Slams Ratings Agencies

clipped from blogs.wsj.com

greenspan In an interview with Sunday’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany’s most prominent newspapers, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan sharply criticized ratings agencies for their role in the current credit crisis. “People believed they knew what they were doing,” Mr. Greenspan says in today’s FAZ. “And they don’t.”

Still, he doesn’t think it’s necessary to strengthen rating-agency regulation. Essentially, they’re “already regulated,” he says, because investors’ loss of trust means the agencies are likely to lose business. “There’s no point regulating this. The horse is out of the barn, as we like to say.” Greenspan also said he believes that the volume of structured-finance products will decrease. “What kept them in place is a belief on the part of those who invested in that, that they were properly priced. Now everyone knows that they weren’t. And they know that they can’t really be properly priced,” said Greenspan.

Greenspan Slams Ratings Agencies

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