February 22, 2008

The credit rating agencies are private public servants.

Sir Jean-Louis Beffa and Xavier Ragot in “The fall of a financial model” February 22, describe the “present standard model of financial capitalism” as “mainly based on the self-regulation of the financial sector, which alone assesses the risks produced by its financial innovations”. Sorry, in what world do they live?

Currently the most important risk assessments are not provided internally by the financial sector but forced upon it by those outsourced risk-measure government bureaucrats we all know as the credit rating agencies. The fact that these agents are private does not make them less public servants