Excessive weight given to credit rating agencies guarantees systemic risks

As an Executive Director I got invited to make some comments at a "Risk Management Workshop for Regulators: Assessing, Managing and Supervising Financial Risk" arranged by the World Bank in Washington during the week 27 April – 2 May 2003. This is what I told them about the credit rating agencies.

“I simply cannot understand how a world that preaches the value of the invisible hand of millions of market agents can then go out and delegate so much regulatory power to a limited number of human and very fallible credit-rating agencies. This sure must be setting us up for the mother of all systemic errors.”

I never got invited to speak to them again.

You could read more on this subject in my blogs:

http://www.subprimeregulations.blogspot.com/ and

http://teawithft.blogspot.com/ looking up under the labels of credit rating agencies and subprime banking regulations.