with SGI being the surviving entity. In the following month, Syncora and Assured Guaranty announced that Assured would reinsure approximately $13.5 billion of SGI-insured policies and provide certain administrative services to SGI with respect to the reinsured policies. In June 2018, Assured Guaranty announced that it had completed the reinsurance transaction. Both companies said that the transaction would strengthen their financial positions. In February 2018, Ambac Assurance Corporation completed rehabilitation of its Segregated Account. The conclusion of the rehabilitation followed the successful completion of Ambac's surplus note exchange offers and consent solicitation, which, together with the satisfaction of all remaining conditions, completed a holistic restructuring transaction that had been announced in 2017. Ambac Assurance Corporation currently pays all claims in full and in cash. As a result of its multiple acquisitions, by 2017 Assured Guaranty owned four different European subsidiaries, which it merged into a single entity in November 2018, named Assured Guaranty (Europe) Ltd. Critiques of the business; rating agencies Some have criticized the whole business model of financial guaranty insurance. In her book Confidence Game, Christine S. Richard examined the industry's basic assumptions. She argued that a monoline's business can be seen as the sale of a triple-A credit rating to a municipal bond issuer. She noted that the rating agencies had different rating scales for municipal issuers and non-municipal issuers (e.g., corporations). Some argued that if the rating agencies had rated municipalities on the same scale they used to rate corporations, the municipalities would have been higher rated, obviating the need for bond insurance. The question was debated before Congress in 2008, at the House Committee on Financial Services under Barney Frank. Richard Blumenthal, then-attorney general of Connecticut, Ajit Jain of Berkshire Hathaway, then-Superintendent Eric Dinallo of the New York State Insurance Department, and a Moody's representative were also in attendance. Standard & Poor's Ratings Services has denied that it employed or employs a separate rating scale for municipal and non-municipal issues. Moody's Investors Service acknowledged that it employed separate rating scales for municipal and non-municipal issues, but has since adopted a uniform rating scale for all issues. The argument that bond insurance provided no value in the municipal bond market was proven wrong not long after the 2008 congressional hearings. The following decade saw a number of significant municipal defaults, including the two largest – by Detroit and Puerto Rico. In both those cases and others,