Illinois Attorney General: S&P “knew they were rating junk, but saying it was high quality”

In a report on Tuesday’s PBS NewsHour, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan told Senior Correspondent Jeffrey Brown that the five billion dollar lawsuit brought against the Standard & Poor’s credit rating agency by the federal government, sixteen states and the District of Columbia won’t be tough to prove.

“I don’t think it’s tough to prove,” said Madigan. “There is an enormous amount of internal information that shows that they knew they weren’t being independent or objective. They knew they were rating junk, but saying it was high quality.”

Along with Madigan, Brown also interviewed S&P’s attorney, Floyd Abrams on Tuesday’s broadcast. Abrams called the idea that S&P committed fraud “fanciful” and added that

“the case will be one in which we will be able to show, I believe, in a very straightforward manner that, taken as a whole, what the company was doing was simply trying its best in trying times to make a good judgment about what was going to happen in the future, a hard judgment.”

Watch Justice Department: Standard & Poor's Defrauded Investors on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.
Illinois Attorney General: S&P “knew they were rating junk, but saying it was high quality”