Credit rating agencies, which play an important role in modern capital markets, completely failed in the years preceding the financial crisis. What is needed is an effective mechanism for rating the raters.

Bankers and the rating agencies believed in financial alchemy.

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

It should apply to all products that rating agencies evaluate.

The credit ratings agencies have been held accountable in two private suits.

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

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

Are rating agencies and the markets really so ill informed about public spending?

Too often, the raters seem content to follow rather than lead sentiment.

Under the Senate s approach, regulators would create rules under which an independent regulatory board would choose raters.

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

Rating agencies and shareholders are nervous when they hear that a stricter regulatory environment is not necessarily a disadvantage.

The major ratings agencies are increasingly complaining about the country s lack of a growth strategy and its outsize budget deficits.

On this view, if investors were able to take raters to court, raters incentives would improve.

Meanwhile, the financial sector failed to create products that would help ordinary people manage the risks they faced, including the risks of home ownership.

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

Indeed, the recent sudden rise in market volatility suggests that they are as bad as rating agencies at detecting the early warning signs of trouble.

They were so non transparent and complex that neither Wall Street nor the ratings agencies could properly assess them.

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

Given this, how free are credit rating agencies to express their opinion on the very institutions that will regulate them?

Ratings agencies had incentives to give good ratings to the high risk securities produced by the investment banks that were paying them.

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

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.

Where are your credit cards?

Do you accept credit cards?

We accept credit cards.

Do you accept a credit card?

Do you take credit cards?

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.

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

The card companies vow to offer full compensation for the losses and reissue new cards upon request.

Credit resources became more readily available.

Credit cards are useful but dangerous.

They didn't take credit cards.

You take credit cards, right?

We don't take credit cards.

You don't accept credit cards?

I have two credit cards.

Sami stole Layla's credit cards.

Member of the Agency...'

All of a sudden, issuers had much more influence on the rating agencies, which, like any good seller, were ready to bend a little not to alienate important customers.

As private rating agencies live on the fees they collect from rated companies, they cannot easily downgrade important clients or the assets they sell.

Which credit cards can I use?

Sorry, we don't accept credit cards.

But what, then, were the credit rating agencies doing?