Blaming Credit Ratings Agencies
May 3, 2010 | Comments | Credit rating, Credit score, credit ratings agencies
European politicians are fuming over the US credit ratings agencies and their role in various financial crises. But some experts say it was governments who allowed rating firms to gain too much power in the first place.
After stocks and the euro took a tumble this week on the announcement that credit rating agency Standard and Poor’s was downgrading Greece’s credit rating to junk status, new calls have gone out for ratings agencies to act “responsibly” and for the creation of an independent European rating agency.
But responsibility is not a word that has been associated with credit ratings agencies much in the wake of the global financial crisis, especially after it emerged that the business practices of the big three US ratings firms – Standard and Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch – played a central role in helping bring about the economic meltdown.
“We should not make the welfare of Europe dependent on ratings agencies,” Peter Bofinger, a member of the German government’s independent economic advisory panel, told the newspaper Die Welt.
German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, who called for a European credit rating agency, said rating agencies must not develop, sell and rate financial products at the same time.
“Conflicts of interest are guaranteed,” he said.
A top International Monetary Fund official questioned the agencies’ accuracy, arguing that that their assessments reflect mainly investors’ perceptions of a nation’s financial health.
“That’s why you shouldn’t believe too much in what they say,” IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said last week.
But according to Manfred Jäger-Ambrozewicz of the Cologne Institute of Business Research, government regulators and governments themselves, who also depend on ratings agencies analysis, have played a role in the increase of the agencies’ influence.
“It’s kind of ridiculous that they’ve turned on them now,” he told Deutsche Welle. “They are the ones who have largely given them so much power.”
He added that the creation of a new European ratings agency would be possible, but that agencies are built on their reputations, and it would take some time for a brand-new ratings entity to become credible.
“But if in addition to the private rating we had something from a semi-state agency or a rating by a body like the IMF or the European Central Bank, that could be helpful,” Jäger-Ambrozewicz said.
Later this year, new EU rules which were hammered out last year will apply some regulation on already-existing agencies that operate in Europe.
The rules, which go into effect in December, will oblige the agencies to disclose information about the models and methods on which their ratings are based and require adherence to new corporate governance standards meant to guard against potential conflicts of interest.
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