Reuters:
Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner angrily warned the chairman of Standard & Poor’s parent that the rating agency would be held accountable for its 2011 decision to strip the United States of its coveted “triple-A” rating, a new court filing shows.
Harold McGraw, the chairman of McGraw-Hill Financial Inc , made the statement in a declaration filed by S&P on Monday, as it defends against the government’s $5 billion fraud lawsuit over its rating practices prior to the 2008 financial crisis.
McGraw said he returned a call from Geithner on Aug. 8, 2011, three days after S&P cut the U.S. credit rating to “AA-plus,” and that Geithner told him “you are accountable” for an alleged “huge error” in S&P’s work.
“He said that ‘you have done an enormous disservice to yourselves and to your country,'” and that S&P’s conduct would be “looked at very carefully,” McGraw said. “Such behavior could not occur, he said, without a response from the government.”
McGraw said he learned of Geithner’s concerns from a message left by a former subordinate at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where Geithner had been president in 2008.
The U.S. Department of Justice, which brought the civil fraud lawsuit, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. New York Fed spokesman Jack Gutt declined to comment.
Discovery is a powerful weapon.
It means that Obama cannot play his ”executive privilege” ploy.
Sweeney added why the gov’t claim that it only wanted to go after S&P because of its actions regarding the sub-prime market’s CDO was meritless:
IS IN IT what he did to win on his opponent the first time he won his seat,
he had look in the other suppose secret papers and dig out a made up to measure scandal and won by discrediting the one running for the seat, that he wanted,
he did it all along his career,ON DIFFERENT PERSONS,
now is the attack for revenge, the intent change but the scenario is still working for him,
Rhetorical question