Contagion Brush Fire
“Each of the six banking systems Portugal, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Greece, the UK… faces different challenges, but the contagion risk could dilute these differences and impose very real, common threats on all of them,” Moody’s said. Moody’s and S&P have…
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Moody’s and S&P have begun to do a great deal of damage to the prospects that the sovereign debt crisis will be contained in Greece. This may be in a reaction to how badly they were burned by MBS ratings which were part of the cause of the credit crisis.
Moody’s and S&P are under pressure from investigations by the federal government and several state attorneys general. Almost all of these inquiries could end in fines and more regulation.
One reasonable reaction by the agencies would be excessive caution which, as the pendulum swings, may lead investors astray again. But, in this case it is only another way to cause investors to go astray.
Douglas A. McIntyre
Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.
Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.