re: #409 garhighway

Agree.

In The Big Short (a great book!) Michael Lewis did a fine job explaining how the people at the rating agencies are consistently outgunned in dealing with their bank counterparts, and how they had little enthusiasm for the task anyway. Those institutions are fundamentally conflicted. I tend to think the government ought to get out of the business of designating them as semi-official scorekeepers.

Well, there’s still a need for some kind of dispassionate analysis, especially of more obscure financial products (e.g., smaller company stock/debt) which fewer people have the time and inclination to analyze.

It’s a bit like the higher education ratings problem: everyone bitches about the US News rankings (and similar in other parts of the world, e.g. the Times UK and global lists) but ultimately there’s a demand for such information, and so organizations arise to fill that demand.

Now, if there was a state funded but independent NPR/BBC-type entity doing the ratings, that would be an interesting development even if it didn’t entirely eliminate the bias problem.