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Corrupt Government Title: Exit the CEO of Standard & Poor’s Exit the CEO of Standard & Poor’s The air of coincidence grows thicker in the boardroom. by John Hayward The CEO of Standard & Poor’s, Deven Sharma, is on his way out. He’s going to vacate the executive office on September 12, work as a consultant for the company until the end of the year, and then hit the bricks. S&P assures us this has nothing to do with any heavy-breathing phone calls that may or may not have been received in the wake of its historic downgrade of U.S. government credit. Perish the thought! No, according to a CNBC report, “The company said it began a search for a new president for S&P after the company split S&P into two separate organizations at the end of last year.” USA Today adds that Sharma “was ready for new challenges.” And all of this is totally unrelated to the recently announced Justice Department probe of S&P, which was in the works forever, and is absolutely not meant as any sort of government pressure against the only one of the Big Three credit agencies to apply reasonable standards to the ridiculously unsustainable debt load of our spendaholic government. No, that’s an investigation into the improper rating of mortgage securities, which led to the massive subprime crisis three years ago – in other words, a time when questionable ratings by S&P actually promoted disastrous Democrat financial policies. It’s a total coincidence that the investigation went high-profile right after the U.S. government lost its AAA credit rating. The Obama Justice Department doesn’t use its power to further partisan political agendas. Just ask the government of Mexico! I think the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms has their phone number. So, who’s taking over once Mr. Sharma has lugged his box full of Dilbert calendars, novelty stamp moisteners, and souvenir coffee mugs out of the CEO’s office? His highly qualified replacement will be Douglas Peterson, who is currently the chief operating officer of Citibank, the chief banking arm of Citigroup. Citigroup? Hey, it seems as if I’ve heard that name in the news recently… Citigroup Inc. (C) and Bank of America Corp. (BAC) were the reigning champions of finance in 2006 as home prices peaked, leading the 10 biggest U.S. banks and brokerage firms to their best year ever with $104 billion of profits. By 2008, the housing market’s collapse forced those companies to take more than six times as much, $669 billion, in emergency loans from the U.S. Federal Reserve. The loans dwarfed the $160 billion in public bailouts the top 10 got from the U.S. Treasury, yet until now the full amounts have remained secret. Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s unprecedented effort to keep the economy from plunging into depression included lending banks and other companies as much as $1.2 trillion of public money, about the same amount U.S. homeowners currently owe on 6.5 million delinquent and foreclosed mortgages. The largest borrower, Morgan Stanley (MS), got as much as $107.3 billion, while Citigroup took $99.5 billion and Bank of America $91.4 billion, according to a Bloomberg News compilation of data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, months of litigation and an act of Congress. Oh, yeah, right. Citigroup was rather heavily involved with all those mortgage securities S&P may have rated improperly, thus prompting a Justice Department investigation that simmered on the back burner for years until coincidentally bursting into flames just a couple of weeks ago. I would imagine news of the U.S. government’s credit downgrade was not received warmly in the Citibank boardroom. It looks as if the manufacture of coincidence has become one of America’s great growth industries. Investors, take note!
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