Québec Droite

C’est à dire que les institutions publiques aient en charge de rémunérer ces agences en instaurant une taxe sur les transactions financières.

Enfin, je pense surtout qu’il faut s’armer de beaucoup de patience face à un tel problème et avec tant de conflits d’intérêts.

Créons un système international de notations des dettes souveraines et assimilées.

Tous les éléments existent, tous les processus sont rodés, tous les professionnels nécessaires sont formés pour opérer  et délivrer des notations dans des conditions raisonnables vis-à-vis des « notés » et, surtout, de la stabilité du système financier international. Donc, pourquoi ne pas créer un système international de cotation des dettes souveraines.

Objection votre honneur ! Qu’est ce qui permettrait vraiment au FMI ou à une nouvelle émanation de celui-ci, de donner des bonnes notes en toute indépendance ? Ne serait-il pas tenté de retenir de mauvaises appréciations pour ne pas mettre en péril ses propres prêts ? Même remarque pour la fameuse agence de notation Européenne dont est annoncée la création prochaine.  Qui gardera les gardiens ? Eternelle question, et facile objection : les actuelles Agences de Notation ont été dramatiquement incompétentes… et personne ne s’interroge sur les contrôles qui devraient leur être imposés. Plus exactement tout le monde y pense, mais personne n’a le temps de se préoccuper de mettre en place ce qui devrait permettre de ne plus subir leurs erreurs ou leur incompétence. A titre d’exemple, le trio des agences n’était franchement pas sous contrôle lorsqu’il distribuait des Triple A, aux produits subprimes, pour ne prendre que ceux-là. On se rappellera l’extrême incapacité des Agence de Notation à prévoir la survenance d’une crise gravissime et on mentionnera que les Agences de notation, comme monsieur de la Palice, ne se sont aperçues de l’effroyable illusion de la politique Islandaise que le jour où ses finances se sont effondrées. On peut penser que la mise en place d’organes de notation spécialisés dans la Dette souveraine et placés dans l’orbite des grandes institutions financières internationales associées aux banques centrales, sera, sans peine, plus sécurisant que le trio actuel, parfaitement incapable.

Il ne s’agit pas de créer des nouveaux monopoleurs à l’image du Trio ! Le ou les organismes, chargés de noter les Etats et leurs démembrements, seraient tenus statutairement à se limiter à cette activité. Il ne serait pas judicieux qu’une Agence Internationale, et une seule, soit autorisée à noter toutes les dettes souveraines, de tous les types, pour tous les Etats et tous leurs démembrements, ainsi que tous les produits financiers dérivés appuyés sur ces dettes.  Au côté d’une agence internationale à vocation mondiale, des agence régionales, européennes pour l’Europe, Asiatiques, Américaines etc. seraient habilitées à traiter des questions les plus locales, qu’il s’agisse d’emprunteurs publics ou semi-publics de taille modeste ou d’émissions de dettes de petite ampleur etc.

Lectures complémentaires:

Extrait de : An Interview About the Ratings Agencies With Jerome Fons, Rortybomb,  May 5, 2010

So to whatever extent there was a craft problem, there was certainly a business problem.

And what’s unfortunate is that the craft and profession of ratings has been sullied by this. I got this when I was on the Hill, people would say to me “it’s all bulls**t. Ratings are crap, there’s nothing there.” And I would say look, there’s a history of nearly 100 years of doing a good job. It can be done. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. There is some substance to the practice, but in this case it was overwritten by the business pressure.

So, what can we do about the business pressure?

That’s the $50,000 question. Some of the reforms get to it. For example, there were two things that stood out in this last crisis. The first is the forum shopping, or what I call rating shopping. The idea that the issuer gets to pick which agency to use, and exclude others. This leads to cherry-picking and contributed to the race to the bottom on standards. So one of the things that the SEC did was that, for any structured product, you have to make the underlying data available to every otter NRSRO. The implication is that rating agencies having access to that information will call out shoddy ratings by a competitor. I’m not sure they will do this.

They should go further and require that it be disclosed to the market. Anything that privileges the ratings agencies shouldn’t be done.

Why don’t investors pay for the ratings? Doesn’t that make more sense?

There are two things here. One is that the value of a rating accrues mainly to the issuer. The value comes in the form of better access to capital and lower cost of funding. Second, investors have historically been unwilling to pay for ratings. There’s a free rider problem, and there’s also an institutional bias against it.

So one regulatory suggestion is to randomized selection of ratings agencies. The SEC picks a ratings agency at random, instead of the person who wants to issue a bond.

Rotating agencies. One problem is that for much of the US, it’s a 2 or 3 ratings market. Most of the structured transactions had 2 rating agencies assign ratings and some had 3. Likewise with rated firms. It’s a very small field and there tends to be multiple ratings agencies on a deal anyway.

So the next step would be to get more ratings agencies into the playing field.

Right, except that the more ratings agencies you have, the more they compete not on the accuracy of their ratings, but on the ratings they are willing to issue and on other aspects of “service.” Remember the agencies aren’t selling accuracy, they are selling this regulatory license.

So we need to decrease the value of this license.

Right. You need to disentangle the ratings agencies and the regulation. One of the nice things about the House bill is that it raises rating agencies’ legal liability and it instructed every federal agency to remove references to NRSRO. That did not make it into the current Senate bill. In the Senate bill, the GAO will study it and give a report.

Currently, the ratings agencies stand behind the first amendment shield, claiming that ratings are nothing more than opinions, and opinions are protected by free speech. That’s plausible in the corporate bond market, they often are providing opinions like a consumer reports. In the structured finance market, it seems that that is a more tenuous argument. They weren’t just impartial observers at arm’s length. They were intimately involved with the creation of these things. Many of them wouldn’t have been created without the ratings agencies, and the ratings agencies had a financial stake in marketing them.

Rating a corporation is more of an arms-length affair: the rating agency has little impact on the corporation’s business, the rating fees are modest and there is typically enough information in the public domain to expose a shoddy rating. In the structured area, the fees were quite high and the ratings agencies were deeply involved with the creation of these things. So for some folks, it crossed the line from free speech to commercial speech.

Let’s throw out some random ideas I’ve heard. One is that we use bond spreads and/or CDS spreads and/or other market information to do the ratings for us.

The CDS market is not as liquid as you’d think. They are limited in the number of names they cover, maybe 600 or 700 are actively traded. I don’t know what really good information is in them. They are also really volatile. For better or worse, investors want fairly stable ratings. So if I have a rating jumping from single-A to B to single-A twice in a day, investors are not going to rely on them for portfolio governance purposes– not that that is a bad thing. The same is true for bond spreads. However, they may make good (though not great) early warning indicators.

This also doesn’t help us for the problem of new issuances. Which is a big problem.

Exactly. I’m a big fan of using markets, though I’m not a huge fan of market efficiency or market omniscience. I’m not a Chicago School person. I intellectually buy into a lot of their stuff, but for that I don’t.

What about not paying the agencies upfront? What about forcing them to get paid over the life of the deal, so there’s a de facto clawback mechanism?

That’s an interesting concept. The bankers and lawyers on the deal are also paid up front too. So you’d have to do that in a fair way.

What about a public option for ratings agencies? The SEC has a division of ratings, and then the market is completely deregulated and everyone else can do whatever they like.

Interesting. Could it truly be independent? And get the trust of investors? That would be a challenge. Would it become politicalized? Would it not be able to favor domestic firms over foreign firms? I don’t think so.

I agree. Now what about something like what Josh Rosner focused on at Make Markets Be Markets for securitization reform, to go with what is in the House, a focus where you ruthlessly focus on the transparency and accessibility of the information ratings agencies use.

I like that approach. Here’s a bolder concept, and I’m not sure if its going to happen in our lifetime. Imagine a central repository of ratings methods and data, accessible to all. Imagine a world of transparent data for all transactions and all securities. What we could then do is empower users, train them in the use of the methods. And evolve methods as needed. You could broadly democratized the process.

In this world you would do your own work, and it isn’t outsourced to clearly conflicted people. I think that’s where we’ll evolve to, but it’ll take a huge shift in our thinking and infrastructure.

If you can get the information out there, people will find the methods. So get the information out there, reduce the value of the license, make firms accountable in some real way.

The major ratings firms could improve transparency today by simply refusing to rate an obligation unless all relevant data is made public. I think that would be an important first step.

The accountability thing is also important. Right now people feel they aren’t accountable.

Extrait de: Credit Rating Agencies In the Crosshairs, Martin Mayer, Brooking,  August 10 2010

There is no agreement about possible solutions to the problem posed by the misjudgments of the ratings agencies. Warren Buffett points out that opening the business to more competitors could be counter-productive, because the most lenient raters would get the most business.

Transparency is not much help; when the agencies published their criteria, they were quickly gamed by the investment banks. One analyst at Moody’s testified that he always assumed the information fed to him by the bank that had assembled a CDO was “a lie.”

The Money Trail
Some economists believe the problems can be minimized if the agencies are not paid until two or three years after the issuance of the bond, to validate or falsify optimistic projections. Others suggest that ratings should be presented as a range, not as a number or a letter.

Henry Kaufman, whose career as a Wall Street economist goes back far enough to include the time when lenders rather than borrowers accumulated and paid for bond ratings, believes the problem is the business model, and that a return to the old ways is still possible. The Dodd-Frank banking reform bill essentially tells the SEC to take care of the problem. The act establishes an Office of Credit Ratings at the SEC, with an obligation to set educational standards for the analysts who will write the ratings; to perform annual inspection of ratings agencies, with authority to assess fines for dishonest work; and even to “de-register” them if they generate too many wrong ratings.

NYU professor White, who served on the Federal Home Loan Bank Board while the savings and loans were coming apart in a miasma of fraud, believes much of the harm has been done by the laws that require “investment grade” and then leave it to third parties to determine what that is. Bank examiners and insurance inspectors already make their own ratings of loans and investments, and their judgments would substitute for bond rankings in measuring the safety and soundness of an investment portfolio.

Meanwhile, says White, the buyers of bonds “would have a far wider choice as to where and from whom they could seek advice as to the safety of the bonds that they might hold in their portfolios. Some institutions might choose to do the necessary research on bonds themselves, or rely primarily on the information yielded by the credit default swap market. Or they might turn to outside advisers.”

Depending on the attitudes of the judges, the most important force for change created by the banking reform bill could turn out to be its creation of a private cause of action for purchasers of securities “recklessly” rated high by the agencies. So long as the issuers of the paper commission and pay for the ratings, there is a case to be made that the ratings agencies have obligations of diligence to the consumers of the materials they generate.

Cahier spéciale : Agences de notation

Table des matières :

Les agences de notation : La terreur des pays souverains qui sont surendettés

Introduction

Situation

Historique

Conflit

A. Conflit d’intérêt avec les entreprises

B. Conflit d’intérêt avec les banques

     Crise immobilière

C. Conflit avec les États souverains

Notation des États Souverains

Les critères des agences de notations pour les pays souverains

Les conséquences d’une décote d’un pays souverain

Dagong Global Credit Rating, une agence chinoise

Mauvaise régulation

Les agences de notation complices de la spéculation

Le Québec selon las paramètres des agences de notation

A. La dette du Québec selon le PIB        

B. Le déficit budgétaire / dépenses budgétaires du Québec

C. La dette brute / sur les revenus

Conclusion

Les conséquences d’une décote sur le Québec

Historique de la notation du Portugal

La situation au Portugal

Les conséquences des taux d’emprunt face à une décote

Simulations une décote de 2 crans pour le Québec

Leurs imputabilités

Balles III

Mais elles ne règles pas les problèmes fondamentaux

Autres solutions

Mais qui a assez de courage pour modifier les agences

Titrisation et crise financière : complice, pas coupable

La crise financière de 2007-2008: réflexions

Source de référence

Format PDF : Les agences de notation : La terreur des pays souverains qui sont surendettés