BELIEVING THE RATINGS.
BELIEVING THE RATINGS. Michael Lewis has another amusing and enlightening article on the financial crisis in the September Vanity Fair. He ridicules the German banks who bought large amounts of toxic securities. He quotes a reporter in Frankfurt who says: “You’d talk to a New York investment banker, and they’d say, ‘No one is going to buy this crap. Oh. Wait. The Landesbanks will!” Lewis cites a German banker who says that the Germans “accepted the official story that triple-A-rated bonds were completely risk-free.”