Remember how bond ratings agency Moody's made the questionable assumption that there would be 225 events a year at the Barclays Center? There's no effective oversight regarding rating agencies like Moody's, Standard and Poor's, and Fitch. In Ratings Agencies Are Overrated , Hugo Dixon ( editor of Reuters Breakingviews, the commentary arm of Reuters) and Christopher Swan write in the Times: Why do markets still pay attention to what rating agencies have to say? After their appalling record predicting the subprime mortgage crisis, it is astonishing and sad that investors still seem to quake when Standard & Poor’s reduces Greece’s rating to junk status and downgrades Spain’s. A Martian would find it hard to understand why anybody gives any credence at all to S.& P. and its rivals. It’s not just that they were pumping up the subprime market. For example, the agencies gave a AAA rating to Abacus, Goldman Sachs’s synthetic collateralized debt obligation, after smar...
This watchdog blog, by journalist Norman Oder, concerns the $6B project to build the Barclays Center arena & 15-16 towers at a crucial site in Brooklyn. Dubbed Atlantic Yards by developer Forest City Ratner in 2003, it was rebranded Pacific Park Brooklyn in 2014 after the Chinese government-owned Greenland USA bought a 70% stake going forward. In 2018, once the arena & four towers were built, Greenland bought out most of Forest City's stake, then sold three leases to other companies.