Friday, September 12, 2008

Rating agencies get "proactive":

After over-assessing the risks to municipals, and under estimating the risks to sub-prime, structured financing, the monolines and banks, the rating agencies are pretending they are getting religion.

Yesterday, $709 million of Georgia's Main Street Natural Gas Series 2008A bonds, which were funded with a gas prepay transaction from Lehman, was put on negative watch because of the counterparty risk of Lehman Brothers Commodity Services.

This got some press, but no-one cared when Fitch put $2 billion of prepaid gas transactions with Merrill Lynch on negative watch in July!
http://www.bondbuyer.com/article.html?id=20080910225IU9ZQ

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