Carl Levin

I have been a mortgage broker for the past 13 years and I have never seen such a lack of attention to loan risk.

It was common knowledge that ratings shopping occurred in structured finance.

So it wasn't just a matter of there wasn't adequate time. Now you are protecting the analyst from abuse, is that it?

So market share mattered, in a nutshell.

Pressure by the investment bankers on your analysts. Pressure applied by managers at Moody's to maintain market share.

Do you know anything about the use of dummies, Ms. Yoshizawa?

I think we got the answer that it ought to be a factor.

It seems to me, is going to shake up folks that are listening to this testimony as to how much these credit ratings can be relied on.

So that it should affect it?

IBG-YBG was explained to me to mean, 'I'll be gone, you'll be gone.'

Let me just ask a couple questions quickly about synthetic CDOs.

Was there a delay in putting that new model in place?

I could not agree with you more. But that is the culture that existed here.

So, again, when they said in that email no special measures, there should have been special measures taken?

And should it affect the credit analysis?

The problem is, outside of the great people that inhabit the United States, that the two greatest things that make this country great are democracy and our capital markets.

We saw the beginning of the assault in our first two hearings, which examined how U.S. financial institutions turned to high-risk lending strategies.

For a hundred years, Main Street investors trusted U.S. credit rating agencies to guide them toward safe investments.

Those toxic mortgages were scooped up by Wall Street firms that bottled them in complex financial instruments.

I would like more candor from senior management about our errors and how we will address them in the future.

Going back to this question of what happened late in 2007...

So you didn't retest your old deals. You just disclosed the new rating to the marketplace?

Did Moody's reevaluate wholesale or just certain transactions?

Well, that is not the part of the testimony he finally acknowledged, which is they were short of resources and didn't get what they requested.

What is your reaction now that you read that, that something that would have been done otherwise could not be done because the writer, a Standard and Poor's employee, had to 'massage the subprime and Alt-A numbers to preserve market share?'