From Bloomberg here:
Standard & Poor’s backtracked on ratings cuts issued last week and raised the ranking on commercial mortgage-backed debt from three bonds sold in 2007.
The securities, restored to top-ranked status, had been downgraded as recently as last week, making them ineligible for the Federal Reserve’s Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility to jumpstart lending.
In other words, one of the rating agencies whose previous negligence and/or greed was near the core of the global financial blow-up would like folks to believe that these securities actually deserved to go from being top-rated, or AAA, to BBB- and then back to AAA in the space of a single week.
Pay no attention to the fact those securities were owned by institutions that paid Standard & Poor’s to rate them and that given the dour state of commercial real estate, those institutions really, really need access to TALF.
Here’s more on the deeply flawed ratings agencies.