INVESTING: Candid e-mails chip away at Wall Street’s credibility
E-mail, today’s ubiquitous form of communication, is proving to be the smoking gun in a number of recent financial fiascos. The Securities and Exchange Commission recently released a draft of its investigation into the behavior of bond-rating firms during the subprime-mortgage-securitization craze. The report highlighted e-mails expressing the sentiment of the authors during the period-a sentiment in conflict with the Wall Street sales pitch being used to sell these securities to investors. One e-mail a Standard & Poor’s analyst sent…