The Role of Credit Rating Agencies in the Subprime Mortgage Crisis

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1. Introduction
Midway through 2007 financial markets began to collapse on news of heavy write-downs by major financial institutions. The housing market in the United States (US), which had been experiencing consistent growth since 1975, began to contract in the third quarter of that year while the delinquency rate had been rising since 2006 (Mortgage Bankers Association, 2008). Investors were uncertain how severe the losses would be but it was becoming more likely by the end of the year that a financial crisis was imminent: the amount of subprime and collateralized debt obligation (CDO) losses had surpassed US$120 billion and were expected to increase in 2008 (Gaffen, 2008). As economic conditions turned from bad to worse investors, academics and practitioners began to wonder how such a crisis could have been precipitated in the first place. Blame was placed on mortgage originators, the Federal Reserve and on the investment banks, to name a few. The credit rating agencies (CRAs), seldom in the spotlight, were also heavily criticized for their role in causing the crisis. CRAs certainly do play an important part in financial markets and Thomas Friedman, the Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist, once remarked that there are two superpowers in the world: the US and Moody’s (Lowenstein, 2008). But did the CRAs really deserve blame or were they being held as scapegoats? In the past the agencies generally avoided significant criticism for their rating of corporate debt and government issues, but their role in the burgeoning structured finance market in the early 2000s was characterized by conflict of interest issues, poor risk modeling and ineffective government regulation. As a result low quality ratings proliferated the mar...

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...s Research Paper Series Research Paper No. 07-46, 59-99.
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