The price of truth: S&P fires its CEO, replaces him with COO of Citibank

August 23, 2011 | Filed under Asshats,corruption,Wall Street | Posted by

The Financial Times is reporting:

Deven Sharma is stepping down as president of Standard & Poor’s only weeks after the rating agency issued an unprecedented downgrade of the credit of the US, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mr Sharma will remain as an adviser to S&P’s owner, McGraw-Hill, for four months and leave the company at the end of the year, they said

Mr Sharma will be replaced as S&P president by Douglas Peterson, chief operating officer of Citibank, the banking unit of Citigroup, they said.

Officially, S&P is reported to have been looking for Mr. Sharma’s replacement for the last six months.  The search for Mr. Sharma’s successor was said to have been triggered by the restructuring of McGrall-Hill Financial, which owns S&P.

Um-hmm, sure.  Whatever.

“Tyler Durden” at Zero Hedge sums this event up nicely:

Alas, this is nothing but a case study of modern corporate reality in America: if you are not with the status quo, you are against it, and you are promptly booted out of it: anyone who does not share the visions of one glorious future built on ponzi schemes, houses of cards, and games of three card monte, will be promptly suicided, either physically or professionally … in America when you dare to tell the truth, your career is over, while if you are a corrupt, lying, incompetent tax evader you not only get to be Treasury Secretary but likely will be on for life as long as you do the one duty you are entrusted with: pander to the interests of the Too Big To Fail financial institutions.

Now we know what happens when we allow the Fed to secretly loan $1.2 trillion to “Too Big To Fail” banks, then give lobbyists from those banks carte blanche to write our nation’s “financial reform” laws — we end up with the US Treasury, the Fed, and the TBTF banks all part of one big, happy, and hopelessly corrupt family.  And if you’re going to be an executive within this system, you had better toe the party line.

If you’ve ever wondered why three out of the four top corporate contributors to Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign were Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, and CitiGroup … well, now you know.

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Posted by on August 23, 2011.
Filed under Asshats, corruption, Wall Street.
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  • http://www.rustedsky.net Anonymous

     This isn’t surprising, sadly.  Wonder how many more days it’ll be until the downgrade is retracted?

  • Anonymous

    It has long been known that, in Washington, lying will get you into trouble, but telling the truth will get you into much greater trouble.

  • Anonymous

    Keep moving, nothing to see here.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_RVIS42ZJEXB6TWZQHYCZF247II Willis Forster

    This is a sell signal for mcgraw hill.

  • Anonymous

    Well, well.  A post on Wizbang that actually says that the banks and government are in corrupt cahoots.  There is hope for enlightenment.

    We live in an oligarchy, not a democracy.  The banks and their allies are plundering the USA and bleeding 90% of the American people.

    Here’s another example:

    Corrupt Obama Administration Pressuring New York Attorney General to Support Mortgage Whitewash

    It is high time to describe the Obama Administration by its proper name: corrupt. Admittedly, corruption among our elites generally and in Washington in particular has become so widespread and blatant as to fall into the “dog bites man” category. But the nauseating gap between the Administration’s propaganda and the many and varied ways it sells out average Americans on behalf of its favored backers, in this case the too big to fail banks, has become so noisome that it has become impossible to ignore the fetid smell.The Administration has now taken to pressuring parties that are not part of the machinery reporting to the President to fall in and do his bidding. We’ve gotten so used to the US attorney general being conveniently missing in action that we have forgotten that regulators and the AG are supposed to be independent. As one correspondent noted by e-mail, “When officials allegiances are to El Supremo rather than the Constitution, you walk the path to fascism.”

    The rest is here:

    http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/08/corrupt-obama-administration-pressuring-new-york-attorney-general-to-support-mortgage-whitewash.html

    • Anonymous

      There is a group trying to get beyond the DC as usual games maybe you’ve heard of them, they call themselves the Tea Party.

      • Anonymous

        Don’t think so – 80% of the Tea Party are stooges for the oligarchy.

        • Anonymous

          Bull Shit you don’t have an idea what your talking about. If the tea party isn’t the anti estabishment movement in this country please pray tell what movement is?

          • Anonymous

            C’mon, the Tea Party are tools for those who want to rape Social Security.  How “anti-establishment” is that?

          • Anonymous

            That is simply not true and you should know it, the Tea Party is just a bunch of normal folks that are sick and tired of getting the shaft by the government and the people that are supposed to represent us, this non sense about social security and medicare is just that non sense intended to scare people into maintianing the status quo.

        • http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/EU5DQWQTTHTPO4A4ZYSL3AAV2U Adjoran

          Another of your scientific surveys?  What was the Margin of Error?  100%?

    • http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/EU5DQWQTTHTPO4A4ZYSL3AAV2U Adjoran

      Wow, a whole paragraph of quoted “evidence” without a single fact, just invective.

      Off the meds again, Chico?

      • Anonymous

        You can read the post at the link for the facts.  The invective was just bait.

        I thought y’all would like it, it being invective against Obama, like a Rick Rice post here.

  • Anonymous

    You gots to be careful with that whole speaking truth to power thing. Dems dont like to hear it as much as they like to say it.

  • Anonymous

     I have been saying this all along, that Obama and the Treasury have a revolving with Goldman Sachs/ Wall Street. Most of the commentators have been bleating about Obama being a socialist or marixist when the closest Obama has become to that  is being a groucho marxist. Even if all of these secret  billions of moral hazard money were given before January, 2009, the Obama adminstration would have made no difference to that of the Bush administration, and Merrill-Lynch were McCain´s biggest corporate donor. All these Wall Street firms want to game the system, priavtize the profits, socialize the losses, with the safety of the moral hazard from government bailouts or more quietly from the Fed; the gift, that keeps on giving, and some of it eventually winds up in the pockets of  political campaigns. 

    • Anonymous

      You voted for him.

    • http://www.facebook.com/michael.laprarie Michael Laprarie

      Steve and Chico, I’ve been beating the crony capitalism drum here in my posts for years.

      The irony is, Obama sold himself to America as a Washington outsider, completely free from DC corruption, no — more than that — a pure soul who had risen ABOVE the need for corruption and partisanship; a bold leader who would free America from the shackles of pay-for-play partisan politics and usher in a new era of justice and equality. 

      Or something like that. 

      Anyway, the sad truth is that he and his gang are just as deeply mired in corruption and cronyism as anyone else.  And I’m afraid they’re stuck there, because the only way they can finance their exorbitantly expensive welfare state is by sucking up to the Wall Street money machine.  But at the same time they are trying to maintain control over the financial system through crony relationships between the government and big banks.

      • Anonymous

        We agree on the cronyism, disagree on the ends.  First, Obama has given Wall Street a pass on the massive frauds in the mortgage securitization scam.  This is the same scam that AIG is now suing Bank of America (Countrywide) about.  The rating agencies were also a part of the scam, either wittingly or not.  They rated this crap subprime debt as AAA.  Obama and Holder look away because Goldman Sachs is a big contributor to Obama’s campaign.

        Other objects include engineering a slow motion default on government debt to the Social Security trust beneficiaries – American workers – to prevent a default to other creditors – the banks, Chinese and Arabs.  Beyond that there is the massive money to be made by Wall Street and its insurance subsidiaries by privatizing Social Security and Medicare.  Maintaining the commodities casino by letting the banks run wild in these markets is another object.

        The Fed’s actions in printing money for speculation in commodities and equities fit in very well with all of this.

        I am not voting for Obama next year – if a nutball like Bachmann wins, I will move assets out of the USA.

        It’s more likely that a Made Man in the oligarchy like Romney will win.

    • retired.military

      Steve you will still gladly go vote for Obama in 2012.

      • Anonymous

        not gladly but I would be  holding my nose, I have a certain schenfreude though in seeing what happens if the GOP would win? It would be more interesting, for about six months!

        • Anonymous

          Yep Steve stick with the guy you know is crooked and is killing the economy that’s a smart plan you got there. You wouldn’t want to vote for CHANGE.

  • Anonymous

    The black cloud over America approves of this message..

  • Ken in Camarillo

    I think it has more to do with dispersing the players in the bogus mortgage instrument ratings. I’d like to see S&P disappear the same way Arthur Anderson did after their bogus audit services.