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Investing

SEC Wants To Rate Ratings Agencies

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Ratings firms like S&P, Moody’s, and Fitch had such monstrously poor track records covering the risks of subprime financial instruments that the SEC may take a hand in regulating them

It’s a good idea. At the heart of the proposed action, the government would take data on past ratings and see how these performed over time. This information would be public. In an open market like this the ratings firms which do poorly are likely to lose most of their business. That would be fine.

So far the ratings firms have been able to avoid normal market forces which would keep track of how well they serve their customers. That may be about to come to an end.

According to The Wall Street Journal "The Securities and Exchange Commission may soon propose rules that require credit-ratings firms to disclose the accuracy of past ratings and distinguish between various products they rate." After the companies let down such a huge portion of their customers, that is only fair.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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