Dear Jim,

To say that this rating agency is peopled by ignoramuses is way too kind. That goes for the other rating agencies as well. They are either completely ignorant, they are suffering from a huge conflict of interest, or both.

Respectfully yours,
Monty Guild
www.GuildInvestment.com

"Moody’s Investors Service announced today that it has revised and updated certain key assumptions that it uses to rate and monitor corporate synthetic CDOs. Moody’s will immediately start reassessing all of its outstanding corporate synthetic CDO ratings across 900 transactions in the U.S., Europe and Asia using these updated assumptions. Based on initial assessment, Moody’s expects to lower the ratings of a large majority of corporate synthetic CDO tranches by three to seven notches on average. The actual magnitude of the downgrades will depend on transaction specific characteristics such as tranche subordination, vintage and portfolio composition…Moody’s is increasing its default probability assumptions for financial and non-financial corporate credits in the reference pools of synthetic CDOs by a factor of 30% across all rating categories…POSTBANK…hrx…deutsche…etc"