McGraw Hill Financial Inc.’s Standard & Poor’s unit seeks information from the board of governors of the Federal Reserve to bolster its defense against U.S. claims it misled investors in mortgage-backed securities, Bloomberg News reported today. The credit rating company said that it served subpoenas on the Federal Reserve board as well as the Federal Open Market Committee and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, according to a court filing yesterday. S&P is “seeking, among other things, information and analyses supporting or relating to specifically identified statements from high ranking government officials such as Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner about the housing market in 2006 and 2007,” it said in the filing, referring to the then-Fed chairman and the former head of the New York Fed. “S&P seeks to identify the data upon which the assessments, similar to those made by S&P, were made.” S&P, based in New York, and the Justice Department are exchanging pre-trial evidence in the U.S. lawsuit that accuses the company of knowingly downplaying the credit risks of residential mortgage-backed securities, as well as that of collateralized-debt obligations that contained those securities, in order to win more business from investment banks.
