The Federal Reserve, and by that I mean you and me, owns quite a bit of interesting things these days. Most of it is worth pennies on the dollars that the Fed bought it for.

An amendment just passed the Senate which allows regulators to assign a credit rating agency to evaluate asset based securities. To date, the ones hiring the credit rating agencies are the ones making up these fictional derivatives.

That said, we have this New York Times article reporting more investigations of banks, but this time trying to find evidence the poor little ole' credit ratings agencies were just played as suckers by the banks (cough, cough):

The New York attorney general has started an investigation of eight banks to determine whether they provided misleading information to rating agencies in order to inflate the grades of certain mortgage securities, according to two people with knowledge of the investigation.

Since ratings models were available to the ones creating the structured finance product, in this case, credit default obligations (CDOs), issuing firms could analyze the ratings methods to figure out where to hide the toxic, worthless crud contained within, yet still land a AAA rating.

It appears that any rumors of increasing tax revenue were unfounded.

The Treasury Department says the April deficit soared to $82.7 billion, the largest imbalance for that month on record. That was significantly higher than last year's April deficit of $20 billion and was above the $30 billion deficit private economists had been forecasting.