tailieunhanh - PUBLIC POLICY FOR THE PRIVATE SECTOR -Credit Rating Agencies

Indeed, the major complaint about the rating agencies during this era was not that they were too compliant to issuers’ wishes but that they were too tough and too powerful. This view was epitomized by the New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman’s remarks in a PBS “News Hour” interview on February 13, 1996: “There are two superpowers in the world today in my opinion. There’s the United States, and there’s Moody’s Bond Rating Service. The United States can destroy you by dropping bombs, and Moody’s can destroy you by downgrading your bonds. And believe me, it’s not clear sometimes who’s more powerful.”. | THE WORLD BANK GROUP FINANCIAL AND PRIVATE SECTOR DEVELOPMENT VICE PRESIDENCY OCTOBER 2009 NOTE NUMBER 8 Jonathan Katz Emanuel Salinas and Constantinos Stephanou Jonathan Katz Jgkatz220@veeizzonnet is a consultant and former secretary of the . Securities and Exchange Commission. Emanuel Salinas esa aim ss v Thl ba rn .oTrk is a senior investment officer at the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency MIGA of the World Bank Group. Constantinos Stephanou ct phhnQU@woridbank .org is a senior financial economist in the Financial and Private Sector Development Vice Presidency of the World Bank Group. This is the eighth in a series of policy briefs on the crisis assessing the policy responses shedding light on financial reforms currently under debate and providing insights for emerging-market policy makers. THE WORLD BANK I International GjF Finance Corporation SSSiilH H I World Bank Group crisis Credit Rating Agencies No Easy Regulatory Solutions In the United States and Europe faulty credit ratings and flawed rating processes are widely perceived as being among the key contributors to the global financial crisis. That has brought them under intense scrutiny and led to proposals for radical reforms. The ongoing debate while centered in major developed markets will also influence policy choices in emerging economies whether to focus on strengthening the reliability of ratings or on creating alternative mechanisms and institutions that can perform more effectively the role that in developed markets has credit rating agencies. A credit rating is an opinion on the creditworthiness of a debt issue or issuer. The rating does not provide guidance on other aspects essential for investment decisions such as market liquidity or price volatility. As a result bonds with the same rating may have very different market prices. Despite this fact and even though each rating agency has its own rating methodologies and scales market participants have often treated similarly rated .