Bankers and the rating agencies believed in financial alchemy.

This is why rating agencies opinions are so valuable.

The rating agencies miscalculated the value of asset backed securities.

The credit rating agencies would probably evaluate the United Nations for credit rating purposes based on various criteria, including

There is widespread recognition that rating agencies have let down investors.

The United Nations goal with respect to the credit rating would be to convince the credit rating agencies to treat the borrowing as quasi sovereign for credit rating purposes.

Predictably, the Senate s bill encountered stiff resistance from the dominant rating agencies.

This would, among other things, reduce the role of credit rating agencies.

Bond rating agencies have issued misleading ratings on companies in questionable health.

Indeed, the rating agencies, whose malfunctions contributed to the crisis, must be regulated.

Rating agencies have been and should remain an important aspect of modern capital markets.

Acknowledging that rating agencies were incompetent without doing anything to regulate them was inexcusable.

Similarly, the rating agencies relied on information provided by the originators of synthetic products.

Appropriate regulation including regulation of rating agencies would most likely make traditional banks popular again.

Bond rating agencies have issued misleading ratings on companies in questionable health. Will we ever again be able to trust a triple A rating issued by, say, Moody s?

Fourth, the role of rating agencies needs to be rethought, with more regulation and competition introduced.

Yet this new thinking has yet to influence significantly the behavior of bond investors and rating agencies.

This broad set of spiraling difficulties has led credit rating agencies to slash Egypt s rating. It is also discouraging foreign direct investment, as is the discrediting of Egypt s police forces.

An investment grade rating reflects the credit rating agencies' belief that the probability of payment of the bond is high and the financial risk associated with the investment is low.

The buyers of the CDOs were often misguided by rating agencies that performed badly and did not provide reliable information. As private rating agencies live on the fees they collect from rated companies, they cannot easily downgrade important clients or the assets they sell.

Moreover, credit rating agencies had serious conflicts of interest, because they received fees from the managers of these instruments.

Since the crisis, rating agencies have been under attack, and major regulation, which could severely affect their business, has been discussed on both sides of the Atlantic. Given this, how free are credit rating agencies to express their opinion on the very institutions that will regulate them?

The second shaky principle is that, in order to validate these instruments, issuers of CDOs relied on credit rating agencies.

Obviously, more detailed calculations and analyses are required, along with discussions with governments, existing institutions, rating agencies, and other stakeholders.

If Europe wants to devise its own rules for credit rating agencies and hedge funds, it should simply go ahead.

Bond investors heavy reliance on credit rating agencies, which tend to be laxer with powerful issuers, has not been fixed.

Lehman Brothers had been awarded a high rating on the very eve of its collapse, yet now the rating agencies criticize governments that pulled the global economy back from the abyss for violating accounting principles.

Credit rating agencies, which play an important role in modern capital markets, completely failed in the years preceding the financial crisis.

In establishing a credit rating on a United Nations bond issue, the credit rating agencies would focus on the source and probability of timely debt service payments, in accordance with the terms applicable to the bond issue.

PARIS Moody s announcement in November that it had downgraded France s sovereign credit rating by one notch from its AAA rating prompted one blogger to poke fun at rating agencies tendency either to get things completely wrong or to recognize suddenly a crisis that had long been staring them in the face.

Investment banks and credit rating agencies believed in financial alchemy the notion that significant value could be created by slicing and dicing securities.

The global banking system and economy was thus vulnerable to the mistakes of the three main rating agencies and their flawed risk models.

The rating agencies have long placed Greek debt deep in junk territory, and are now giving Portuguese and Irish debt the same status.

Credit rating agencies, institutional investors, and asset managers are encouraged to see how such factors can be incorporated into their own risk models.

Rating agencies would consider this debt exchange a credit event, but only for a very short period a matter of a few weeks.

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Today, no one will or should trust the rating agencies, or the investment banks that purveyed flawed products (sometimes designing them to lose money).

Rating agencies have been and should remain an important aspect of modern capital markets. But to make ratings work, the raters need to be rated.

Since each issuer represented a small fraction of their revenues, rating agencies were unwilling to compromise their reputation for the sake of any single issuer.

CAMBRIDGE In the new financial order being put in place by regulators around the world, reform of credit rating agencies should be a key element.

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