According to the 2006 Credit Rating Agency Reform Act, if the SEC decided to probe Standard & Poor’s for insider trading related to their recent downgrade of U.S. Treasuries, and if they found that someone there had leaked information about it to banks or hedge funds, then the SEC could make it awfully hard for S&P to continue its rating business. But that’s a long shot. Surely nobody’s fantasizing about that on Capitol Hill at the moment. [MarketWatch]
