{"id":7964,"date":"2012-02-16T23:57:20","date_gmt":"2012-02-16T22:57:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=7964"},"modified":"2012-02-16T23:57:20","modified_gmt":"2012-02-16T22:57:20","slug":"who-are-these-credit-rating-agencies-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=7964","title":{"rendered":"Who are these credit rating agencies? (2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

That was the question I asked in my posting<\/a> yesterday and today the “Guadian” devoted three and a half pages to a feature<\/a> addressing precisely this issue.<\/p>\n

“More people would trust the agencies if they hadn’t got so much so wrong so recently. In 2009 Moody’s issued a report titled “Investor fears over Greek government liquidity misplaced”; within six months, the country was seeking a bailout. Meanwhile, S&P’s sovereign debt team miscalculated US debt by as much as $2tn when it downgraded America’s credit rating last August.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
He explains that:<\/p>\n
“In the run-up to 2008, a staggering proportion of mortgage-based debts were rated AAA, when in fact they were junk. The same goes for groups such as Enron, Lehman Brothers and AIG. Days before they went bust, Moody’s, S&P, and Fitch all still rated these failing companies as safe investments. Shockingly, more than half of all corporate debt ever rated AAA by S&P has been downgraded within seven years.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Is there an alternative to the stranglehold by three dominant credit rating agencies?<\/p>\n
” ‘The obvious solution would be to take this public service into public hands,’ Aditya Chakrabortty has argued. ‘Let’s have a ratings agency run by the UN, funded by pooled contributions from both lenders and borrowers … Let’s make the ratings business a utility, rather than a semi-cartel that intimidates elected politicians and rakes in excess profits. It’s time to break up the bullying double-act.’ “<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
That was the question I asked in my posting yesterday and today the “Guadian” devoted three and a half pages to a feature addressing precisely this issue. Patrick Kingsley points out: “More people would trust the agencies if they hadn’t got so much so wrong so recently. In 2009 Moody’s issued a report titled “Investor […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7964"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7964\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7971,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7964\/revisions\/7971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}