{"title":"How to Reform the Credit-Rating Process to Support a Sustainable Revival of Private-Label Securitization ¤","authors":"R. Herring, E. Kane","doi":"10.1142/S2010139212500024","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"US product-liability laws unwisely treat credit-rating organizations (CROs) as if they produce opinions rather than empirically-based economic research. In principle, trained professionals gather time-varying information (\"financial news\") and analyze it statistically to reduce it to a single dimension, allegedly for the benefit of investors, which, in turn, enables issuers to finance themselves at lower cost. In practice, the issuer-pays business model currently used for funding the production and distribution of ratings information creates an incentive to favor high-volume issuers by over-rating private-label securitizations. While the Dodd–Frank Act intensifies SEC oversight of CRO activity, the SEC has a history of being captured by regulatory clients. We argue that the fundamental solution is to create accountability in the ratings process so that private label securitizations can play a constructive role in the provision of credit and we go on to offer some conjectures about how this could be done.","PeriodicalId":45339,"journal":{"name":"Quarterly Journal of Finance","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9000,"publicationDate":"2012-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Quarterly Journal of Finance","FirstCategoryId":"91","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1142/S2010139212500024","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"BUSINESS, FINANCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
US product-liability laws unwisely treat credit-rating organizations (CROs) as if they produce opinions rather than empirically-based economic research. In principle, trained professionals gather time-varying information ("financial news") and analyze it statistically to reduce it to a single dimension, allegedly for the benefit of investors, which, in turn, enables issuers to finance themselves at lower cost. In practice, the issuer-pays business model currently used for funding the production and distribution of ratings information creates an incentive to favor high-volume issuers by over-rating private-label securitizations. While the Dodd–Frank Act intensifies SEC oversight of CRO activity, the SEC has a history of being captured by regulatory clients. We argue that the fundamental solution is to create accountability in the ratings process so that private label securitizations can play a constructive role in the provision of credit and we go on to offer some conjectures about how this could be done.
期刊介绍:
The Quarterly Journal of Finance publishes high-quality papers in all areas of finance, including corporate finance, asset pricing, financial econometrics, international finance, macro-finance, behavioral finance, banking and financial intermediation, capital markets, risk management and insurance, derivatives, quantitative finance, corporate governance and compensation, investments and entrepreneurial finance.