This is funny. From Bloomberg News;
Feb. 12 (Bloomberg) -- McGraw-Hill Cos. won’t be publishing a book on the financial crisis that the author says addresses the role of one of its units in the recent market turmoil.
Barry Ritholtz, chief executive officer of equity-research firm FusionIQ, said he withdrew the manuscript from the New York publisher and returned his advance after the company tried to edit passages critical of its Standard & Poor’scredit-rating division. McGraw-Hill says it wasn’t initially able to verify some of the book’s claims.
“The book made a number of assertions covering a range of public figures and public entities that needed corroboration,” McGraw-Hill spokeswoman Mary Skafidas said today in a telephone interview. “We could not come up with a unified approach with the author.”
In one section of the roughly 300-page book, “Bailout Nation: How Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy,” Ritholtz wrote that Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s Investors Service and Fitch Ratings inflated their opinions in exchange for fees.
“It’s kind of hard to write a book about the financial crisis without mentioning the ratings agencies,” Ritholtz, 47, said in an interview.
Exactly Barry! How the hell did McGraw Hill, owner of S&P, think they were going to publish a book about the credit crisis and get around the whole "ratings thing"?? Why did they even waste a minute of their time, as well as Ritholtz's! Too bad they didn't go ahead with it. Despite a few slaps on the wrist, the ratings companies, hiding behind the disclaimer they put on every bond or structure that they rate, have gotten off pretty easy. It would have been great if McGraw Hill published the book, as is, and then triggered a law suit against S&P! After all, if their parent McGraw Hill published a book by a respected market expert, implicating S&P in a "buy your way to a AAA" scam, perhaps a savvy lawyer could have turned it around on S&P!
These are some of the things I fantasize about.
