CREDIT RATING AGENCIES, THE SUBPRIME MORTGAGE DEBACLE AND GLOBAL GOVERNANCE: THE EU STRIKES BACK

The global financial crisis has served to highlight serious weaknesses in global governance, revealing fault lines in the international financial architecture and its accompanying regulatory apparatus. Most glaringly, the spotlight has fallen on Credit Rating Agencies (CRAs)—key governance agencies in the pre-crisis domestic and international regulatory structures, and ones directly linked to the subprime mortgage debacle. The aim of this article is to provide a critical appraisal of CRAs as a mechanism of global governance in the light of their role in the subprime mortgage debacle and to evaluate the case for stricter regulation of CRAs. In this respect, special emphasis is placed on the recent EU attempt—by way of a new Regulation on Credit Rating Agencies—to bring rating agencies within the regulatory fold. It is argued that while the EU Regulation has serious implications for the operation of CRAs within the Community, the reform measure is potentially illustrative of a growing dissonance between EU and US responses to global governance issues more generally.‘[Securitisation led to the belief among many that] poor quality assets … assembled as a portfolio … could somehow by alchemy be converted into something stronger than they were’.1‘The crap had become cake.’2‘In January 2008, there were 12 triple A-rated companies in the world. At the same time, there were 64,000 structured finance instruments, like CDO tranches, rated triple A.’3

Markets: The Credit Rating Agencies

This paper will explore how the financial regulatory structure propelled three credit rating agencies—Moody's, Standard & Poor's (S&P), and Fitch—to the center of the U.S. bond markets—and thereby virtually guaranteed that when these rating agencies did make mistakes, these mistakes would have serious consequences for the financial sector. We begin by looking at some relevant history of the industry, including the series of events that led financial regulators to outsource their judgments to the credit rating agencies (by requiring financial institutions to use the specific bond creditworthiness information that was provided by the major rating agencies) and when the credit rating agencies shifted their business model from “investor pays” to “issuer pays.” We then look at how the credit rating industry evolved and how its interaction with regulatory authorities served as a barrier to entry. We then show how these ingredients combined to contribute to the subprime mortgage debacle and associated financial crisis. Finally, we consider two possible routes for public policy with respect to the credit rating industry: One route would tighten the regulation of the rating agencies, while the other route would reduce the required centrality of the rating agencies and thereby open up the bond information process in way that has not been possible since the 1930s.