Standard & Poor’s may complete as early as Monday a $1.38 billion accord with the U.S. and 19 states over claims it inflated subprime mortgage-bond ratings before the financial crisis, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The ratings company deepened the 2008 economic collapse by giving top ratings to bad mortgage debt to win business from Wall Street banks, the government said. The U.S. said that it might seek as much as $5 billion when it sued S&P in 2013. The states and the District of Columbia also sued the McGraw Hill Financial Inc. unit. The Justice Department has secured settlements worth tens of billions of dollars during the past two years from mortgage lenders and banks it blamed for the financial crisis. Those companies generated unprecedented amounts of shoddy mortgages packaged and sold to investors as securities, many of which turned out to be worthless despite investment-grade ratings. New York-based S&P, the only credit rater sued by the Justice Department’s residential mortgage-backed securities working group, contends that it was singled out because it downgraded U.S. debt in 2011. Its competitors, which issued the same grades for the same securities, did not face similar suits. The case is scheduled for trial in September.
