Word: lettering
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This time around, though, the ratings agencies didn't just fail to see a financial calamity coming. They helped cause it. Why did collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) based partly on risky subprime mortgages lead to so much trouble? Because Moody's and S&P awarded them dubiously generous letter grades. It's the same story for the mostly incomprehensible tizzy over bond insurance...
...practice of giving letter grades to bonds to reflect their riskiness was pioneered by John Moody in 1909. But the industry took its current form only in the early 1970s. That's when Moody's and its competitors switched from selling research to investors to charging bond issuers to rate their goods. This approach wasn't unheard of: you have to advertise in Good Housekeeping to get the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. What made it problematic was that at about the same time, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) exalted the status of the ratings by writing them into...
...believe--as he seems to--that aerial bombing is on a moral continuum with Nazi genocide? And that Adolf Hitler's hatred of Jews is comparable to Churchill's hatred of the Germans and Japanese? (We get Mrs. Churchill calling them "Nazi hogs" and "yellow Japanese lice" in a letter?) Or that the world would be a better place if--delirious fantasy--Europe had met German aggression with nonviolent resistance? I mean, if you're going to strongly imply that England should have made peace with Hitler, you might as well just come...
...backed down from her comments, but she has jumped ship as Clinton’s “Honorary New York Leadership Council Chair,” a position that, while sounding meaningless, had the congresswoman campaigning on Clinton’s behalf. That said, her letter of resignation has all the contrite grace of a Molotov cocktail hurled into one’s former workplace. She writes, “I am stepping down from your finance committee so I can speak for myself…The Obama campaign is attacking me to hurt you. I won?...
...would be about her upcoming visit to campus. When she picked up the phone, however, it was an admissions officer telling her she had been accepted, even though official decisions would not be available for over a month.A few days later, the phone call would be followed by a letter confirming that she could expect to receive an offer from the school.According to Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons ’67, in each of the past five years, Harvard has sent out between 64 and 114 of these storied “likely letters?...