Calpers Sues Over Ratings of Securities - NYTimes.com

Well we all knew this was coming from some large investor and no one should be surprised it comes from Calpers.!

Calpers Sues Over Ratings of Securities - NYTimes.com:

"Calpers maintains that in giving these packages of securities the agencies’ highest credit rating, the three top ratings agencies — Moody’s Investors Service, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch — “made negligent misrepresentation” to the pension fund, which provides retirement benefits to 1.6 million public employees in California.

The AAA ratings given by the agencies “proved to be wildly inaccurate and unreasonably high,” according to the suit, which also said that the methods used by the rating agencies to assess these packages of securities “were seriously flawed in conception and incompetently applied.”

and later:

"While the lawsuit is not the first against the credit rating agencies, some of which face litigation not only from investors in the securities they rated but from their own shareholders, too, it does lay out how an investor as sophisticated as Calpers, which has $173 billion in assets, could be led astray.

The security packages were so opaque that only the hedge funds that put them together...and the ratings agencies knew what the packages contained. Information about the securities in these packages was considered proprietary and not provided to the investors who bought them.

Calpers also criticized what contends are conflicts of interest by the rating agencies, which are paid by the companies issuing the securities — an arrangement that has come under fire as a disincentive for the agencies to be vigilant on behalf of investors.