This book aims to present a picture of one of the world’s leading credit rating agencies. Credited as being the first credit rating agency, Moody’s stands as the epitome of the rating sector and all that it effects. However, outside of internal and non-public histories compiled within the rating agency itself, the story of Moody’s has never been told, until now. However, this is not a historical book. Rather, this book paints a picture of Moody’s on a wider canvas that introduces the concept of rating to you, taking into account the origins of the sector, the competitive battles that formed the modern-day oligopoly, and the characters that have each taken their turn on sculpting the industry that, today, is critical to the modern economy. The book is a story of personable people who provided the market with what it needed, but it is more than that. It is a story of conflict, impact, strategy, and most of all the relationship between big business and modern society. Standing as the gatekeeper to the capital markets that form the core of modern society, Moody’s represents the very best of what the marketplace can produce, but also the very worst. This story takes in economic crises in the antebellum US, the Panics of the early 1900s, the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression and, of course, the Global Financial Crisis. It does this because, at the heart of each one was a member of the rating industry or the reporting industry that preceded it. Associated with almost any financial scandal you may care to remember the credit rating agencies, in their often-uncomfortable role as gatekeepers, have their fingerprints on most financial scandals and calamities. This book tells the story of the industry’s founding member.

This book details the difference between the two rating industries, but this difference is converging all the time. The concept of investing in a more responsible and sustainable manner is drawing in some of the world’s leading investors and, with it, regulations and policies are developing at the highest levels. However, the market is not getting what it needs to fully submit to the concept of responsible investing. It has called for more to be done from those tasked with injecting information into their processes, and two industries in particular have been identified as being natural partners. It has been suggested that they are on a collision course to serve the mainstream investor, and in this book, that collision course is contextualised, explained, presented, and finally its outcome predicted.

To the Brink of Destruction exposes how America's rating agencies helped generate the global financial crisis of 2007 and beyond, surviving and thriving in the aftermath. Despite widespread scrutiny, rating agencies continued to operate on the same business model and wield extraordinary power, exerting extensive influence over public policy. Timothy J. Sinclair brings the shadowy corners of this story to life by examining congressional testimony, showing how the wheels of accountability turned—and ultimately failed—during the crisis. He asks how and why the agencies risked their lucrative franchise by aligning so closely with a process of financial innovation that came undone during the crisis. What he finds is that key institutions, including the agencies, changed from being judges to being advocates years before the crisis, eliminating a vital safety valve meant to hinder financial excess. Sinclair's well-researched investigation offers a clear, accessible explanation of structured finance and how it works. To the Brink of Destruction avoids tired accusations, instead providing novel insight into the role rating agencies played in the worst crisis of modern global capitalism.

This book is a practical guide to the latest risk management tools and techniques applied in the market to assess and manage credit risks at bank, sovereign, corporate and structured finance level. It strongly advocates the importance of sound credit risk management and how this can be achieved with prudent origination, credit risk policies, approval process, setting of meaningful limits and underwriting criteria. The book discusses the various quantitative techniques used to assess and manage credit risk, including methods to estimate default probabilities, credit value at risk approaches and credit exposure analysis. Basel I, II and III are covered, as are the true meaning of credit ratings, how these are assigned, their limitations, the drivers of downgrades and upgrades, and how credit ratings should be used in practise is explained. Modern Credit Risk Management not only discusses credit risk from a quantitative angle but further explains how important the qualitative and legal assessment is. Credit risk transfer and mitigation techniques and tools are explained, as are netting, ISDA master agreements, centralised counterparty clearing, margin collateral, overcollateralization, covenants and events of default. Credit derivatives are also explained, as are Total Return Swaps (TRS), Credit Linked Notes (CLN) and Credit Default Swaps (CDS). Furthermore, the author discusses what we have learned from the financial crisis of 2007 and sovereign crisis of 2010 and how credit risk management has evolved. Finally the book examines the new regulatory environment, looking beyond Basel to the European Union (EU) Capital Requirements Regulation and Directive (CRR-CRD) IV, the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. This book is a fully up to date resource for credit risk practitioners and academics everywhere, outlining the latest best practices and providing both quantitative and qualitative insights. It will prove a must-have reference for the field.

The financial difficulties experienced by Greece since 2009 serve as a reminder that countries (i.e., sovereigns) may default on their debt. Many observers considered the financial turmoil was behind us because major advanced countries had adopted stimulus packages to prevent banks from going bankrupt. However, there are rising doubts about the creditworthiness of several advanced countries that participated in the bailouts. In this uncertain context, it is particularly crucial to be knowledgeable about sovereign ratings. This book provides the necessary broad overview, which will be of interest to both economists and investors alike. Chapter 1 presents the main issues that are addressed in this book. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 provide the key notions to understand sovereign ratings. Chapter 2 presents an overview of sovereign rating activity since the first such ratings were assigned in 1918. Chapter 3 analyzes the meaning of sovereign ratings and the significance of rating scales; it also describes the refinement of credit rating policies and tools. Chapter 4 focuses on the sovereign rating process. Chapters 5 and 6 open the black box of sovereign ratings. Chapter 5 compares sovereign rating methodologies in the interwar years with those in the modern era. After examining how rating agencies have amended their methodologies since the 1990s, Chapter 6 scrutinizes rating disagreements between credit rating agencies (CRAs). Chapters 7 and 8 measure the performances of sovereign ratings by computing default rates and accuracy ratios: Chapter 7 looks at the interwar years and Chapter 8 at the modern era. The two chapters assess which CRA assigns the most accurate ratings during the respective periods. Chapters 9 and 10 compare the perception of sovereign risk by the CRAs and market participants. Chapter 9 focuses on the relation between JP Morgan Emerging Markets Bond Index Global spreads and emerging countries’ sovereign ratings for the period 1993–2007. Chapter 10 compares the eurozone members’ sovereign ratings with Credit Default Swap-Implied Ratings (CDS-IRs) during the Greek debt crisis of November 2009–May 2010.

The first consumer credit bureaus appeared in the 1870s and quickly amassed huge archives of deeply personal information. Today, the three leading credit bureaus are among the most powerful institutions in modern life—yet we know almost nothing about them. Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion are multi-billion-dollar corporations that track our movements, spending behavior, and financial status. This data is used to predict our riskiness as borrowers and to judge our trustworthiness and value in a broad array of contexts, from insurance and marketing to employment and housing. In Creditworthy, the first comprehensive history of this crucial American institution, Josh Lauer explores the evolution of credit reporting from its nineteenth-century origins to the rise of the modern consumer data industry. By revealing the sophistication of early credit reporting networks, Creditworthy highlights the leading role that commercial surveillance has played—ahead of state surveillance systems—in monitoring the economic lives of Americans. Lauer charts how credit reporting grew from an industry that relied on personal knowledge of consumers to one that employs sophisticated algorithms to determine a person's trustworthiness. Ultimately, Lauer argues that by converting individual reputations into brief written reports—and, later, credit ratings and credit scores—credit bureaus did something more profound: they invented the modern concept of financial identity. Creditworthy reminds us that creditworthiness is never just about economic "facts." It is fundamentally concerned with—and determines—our social standing as an honest, reliable, profit-generating person.