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From memory: the Excel bug that caused Moody's to give high ratings of mortgage securities (one of the probable causes of the whole mess) was known, but managem

by andr 18y ago

From memory: the Excel bug that caused Moody's to give high ratings of mortgage securities (one of the probable causes of the whole mess) was known, but management decided not to fix it. So, greed can override checks and balances.

nradov 18y ago
The bug wasn't in Excel. It was Moody's own fault, not Microsoft's.
- LukeG 18y ago
  No, their version had a bugger where zero in the denominator came back as "infinity."
- andr 18y ago
  Sorry, I didn't express myself clearly. I meant a bug in an Excel spreadsheet made by Moody's.
Dilpil 18y ago
The issue was not a bug, it was a fundamental misunderstanding of how real estate markets work. Moody's had a model for pricing mortgages which assumed real estate prices never went down. It was basically the real life equivalent of the famous "Assume a spherical cow..." problem.