DealBook: Goldman and Citigroup Hire Moody's to Salvage Bond Sale

Reuters is reporting that the U.S. Department of Justice is considering bringing a lawsuit against Moody's for fraud.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s efforts to revive housing are making real estate bulls even more bullish. JPMorgan Chase & Co. more than doubled its forecast for U.S. home price gains in 2013 to 7% this week, and predicts a more than 14% increase through 2015. Bank of America Corp. said last week property values will jump 8% this year, up from a prior estimate of 4.7% in a report titled “Someone say house party?”

While Moody's slipped over 20% when the DoJ announced its cajillion dollar lawsuit against S&P for knowing the crisis was coming but not telling anyone, it later bounced back over 10% as investors believed the non-US-downgrading rating agency (that happened to be owned by Buffett) was too-big-to-jail.

Petroleo Brasileiro SA plans to sell $11 billion of bonds abroad, the most ever for an emerging-market issuer, according to a person familiar with the offering. Petrobras, as the Brazilian state-run oil producer is known, is offering fixed-rate bonds due in three, five, 10 and 30 years as well as three- and five-year floating-rate notes, according to a person, who asked not to be identified because terms aren’t set.

Moody's could follow the lead of two other international ratings agencies and downgrade Greece's debt rating, the country's finance minister said in an interview published Sunday."It is possible that we will have a cut by Moody's. I don't rule it out," Greek Finance Minister Georgios Papakonstantinou told daily Spanish newspaper El Pais.Standard and Poor's on Wednesday lowered its rating of Greek government debt one step to BBB+ from A-, and said it may downgrade it further, on concern the nation will struggle to tackle its budget deficit, the largest in the EU.

Portugal raised a fresh one billion euros ($1.39 billion) in a short-dated bond sale Wednesday but had to pay investors much higher rates of return after Moody's downgraded the indebted country.The government debt agency said it sold the 12-month bonds at a rate of 4.331 percent, up from the 4.057 percent it paid only days ago on March 2 at a similar sale.