Undue influence?

Sir amazed I read on FT’s front page “”Bankers influenced rating agencies… unduly” April 23. I ask, did not the regulators unduly influence banks and investors to give undue weight to many unduly prepared opinions of the credit rating agencies? Is not overselling one’s product something perfectly normal? Why would the credit rating agencies’ opinions be more covered by the 1st Amendment’s freedom of expression rights than the opinions of the bankers?

Don’t fight it… accept it… on the subject of the hundreds of letter I have sent you denouncing the very subprime bank regulations that were concocted by the Basel Committee and which that caused this crisis… you have let yourself to be unduly influenced by the undue opinions to withhold from the general public my very correct opinions by some of your own opinionated writers.

We might be better off ignoring the credit rating agencies

Sir Gillian Tett in “It’s no wonder agencies are so jumpy over monoline saga” November 9, mentions that Fitch has sort of graciously conceded the “monolines a period of time in which they can raise fresh capital to avoid downgrades”. What financial Frankenstein’s monsters have our regulators created?

Where do they get the powers from to give this sort of instructions while simultaneously telling us that they are only giving opinions and which in terms of the First Amendment means they are not responsible for anything? Perhaps the best we can do is for all regulators to give immediate orders to the market to ignore anything the credit rating agencies say and then take it from there.

Could the world’s financial nannies get away with anything?

Sir, the bank regulators of the world decided over the last decades to give some few credit rating agencies an immense role channelling the financial flows of the world. No matter what their reasons, I have always suspected it had mostly to do with some laid-off Soviet central planners migrating to Basel; they surely must have expected the credit rating agencies to behave in a responsible and accountable way. Now, when we hear these same agencies argue that all they do is opine and that their opinions are protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution, those two basic premises do not necessarily seem so valid. Since any responsible parent, no matter how much they might trust their nanny would never want to leave their children in the custody of someone who thinks she could get away with anything, we now eagerly await what the regulators have to say about all this. Or do they just don’t care?