Brace yourselves, everyone. It would appear that credit rating agencies might have been a little bit more than negligent up through last year. Oh noes!

A McClatchy Newspapers investigation has found that Moody’s punished executives who questioned why the company was risking its reputation by putting its profits ahead of providing trustworthy ratings for investment offerings.

Instead, Moody’s:

• Promoted executives who headed its “structured finance” division, which assisted Wall Street in packaging loans into securities for sale to investors.
• Stacked its compliance department with the people who awarded the highest ratings to pools of mortgages that soon were downgraded to junk. Such products have another name now: “toxic assets.”

First, McClatchy, here’s the scoop: everyone knows the credit rating agencies are kind of worthless. Remember the cow incident? Not only would they rate it, they would have rated it highly, because why not. It’s what business wants, after all, and what’s good for business is good for America. Why do you hate America, McClatchy Newspapers?

“The story at Moody’s doesn’t start in 2007; it starts in 2000,” said Mark Froeba, a Harvard-educated lawyer and senior vice president who joined Moody’s structured finance group in 1997.

“This was a systematic and aggressive strategy to replace a culture that was very conservative, an accuracy-and-quality oriented (culture), a getting-the-rating-right kind of culture, with a culture that was supposed to be ‘business-friendly,’ but was consistently less likely to assign a rating that was tougher than our competitors,” Froeba said.

Froeba, predictably, had to go and get all “ethical” about it and made a stink about doing the right thing, whatever that is. He was fired shortly thereafter, presumably for also hating America. C’mon, Mark, use your Harvard smarts. You should know that the squeaky wheel gets the pink slip. Next time maybe you’ll remember what happens to snitches (hint: rhymes with “stitches”) (actually, is stitches. Sorry.).

The rest of the awesomely slanted article goes on to singlehandedly blame Moody’s for everything bad that has ever happened in life, including the untimely death of the writer’s cat under the wheels of a truck piloted by Moody’s. It’s all about maintaining shareholder value at any cost, blah blah blah. And then, subtly tucked away in the middle of it all is this little gem:

Moody’s, which rates McClatchy’s debt and assigns it quite low value, disputes every allegation against it. “Moody’s has rigorous standards in place to protect the integrity of ratings from commercial considerations,” said Michael Adler, Moody’s vice president for corporate communications.

In other news, McClatchy’s debt rating was cut to a heretofore unseen DDD level, which means it is actually radioactive with used drug needles sticking out of it and should not be handled by anyone ever.