Spitzer Drowns Out Fitch's Response To MBIA

This was one of those “you can’t make this stuff up” kind of days.

First came Fitch’s response to MBIA’s (MBI) request from last week that Fitch withdraw some of its ratings. In a letter to MBIA CEO Jay Brown, Fitch CEO Stephen Joynt said that MBIA had asked Fitch to “return or destroy” key portfolio information “and discontinue all use of that information in proceeding with our rating analysis. He then said it appeared to be “‘disingenuous at best” for MBIA to have said, as it did last week, that it intends “to work with Fitch to perform the analysis needed to rate [MBIA’s] debt securities,’ while privately demanding return of the portfolio information and materials that you freely provided to support our ratings…”

Joynt further said that rather than “‘work with Fitch, your intention could be to emasculate our opinion. by withholding information and subsequently discredit our opinion as being uninformed.”

There was more — much more — and it was rich but, thanks to Eliot Spitzer, it was buried.

Then came the Spitzer news. What was he thinking?

Hey, I’ve got it: A few years ago he was among those named by Overstock (OSTK) CEO Patrick Byrne in his now infamous Miscreants Ball speech. According to the tale, spun by Byrne, Spitzer was part of a cabal allegedly involving a host of journalists (including yours truly), hedge fund managers and a list way too long to recall that was controlled by mystical Sith Lord.

So maybe, just maybe, Spitzer was under the spell of the Sith Lord each time he visited the Mayflower Madame?

Or maybe, like so many other smart people, he wasn’t really so smart, after all. What an absolutely pathetic end to a brilliant career.

And proof, yet again, that truth is stranger than fiction.

Comments

[mar del plata-buenosaires]

Does everybody that writes for seeking alpha also short the monolines? You guys are worthless, obvious and more than fake and transparent! Find some foreign stocks to short, start being more American! Write about some valuable issues. Give some solutions to helping our economy! Stop trashing our companies...

[fxtrader07]

Herb, you are a poster child for bad journalism (i.e. cooking negative stories about specially targetted companies all day that were told to you by your hedgefund friends and masters). Now, switching to an "analyst's career" you stop pretending being a jourmalist any more. or so i hope at least.
Now you can directly provide your "independent"... bashing "research". Not much will change, though. Your naked short selling friends (uh, oh, naked short selling doesn't even exit, right, Herb? Too bad for you, that even the SEC regards it as a huge problem by now) will call you up as usual telling you the stories as they need them to destroy ever more companies with false allegations and cooked-up "research".
The world will be way better off without your crooked stories, Herb, that much is for sure.