Standard & Poor’s, accused of inflating its ratings to win business during the boom in mortgage investments, urged a judge yesterday to dismiss the federal government’s civil case against it, saying that the Justice Department had built a faulty complaint on "isolated snippets" of conversations rather than evidence of real wrongdoing, the New York Times DealBook blog reported yesterday. S&P, the largest ratings agency in the U.S., was responding to civil fraud charges filed in February in the first significant federal action against the ratings industry since the mortgage bubble burst. The Justice Department’s lawsuit accused S&P of knowingly giving complex packages of mortgages higher ratings than they deserved, stoking investor demand for the securities and driving up prices to where they crashed, setting off the global financial crisis.
