Columbia Law School Scholarship Archive Faculty Scholarship Faculty Publications 2011 Ratings Reform: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly John C. Coffee Jr. Columbia Law School,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Banking and Finance Law Commons, and the Law and Economics Commons Recommended Citation John C. Coffee Jr., Ratings Reform: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, 1 HARV. BUS. L. REV. 231 (2011). Available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/615 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Publications at Scholarship Archive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Scholarship Archive. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. RATINGS REFORM: THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY JOHN C. COFFEE, JR.* Although dissatisfaction with the performance of the credit rating agencies is universal (particularlywith regard to structuredfinance), reformers divide into two basic camps: (1) those who see the "issuer pays" model of the major credit ratings firms as the fundamental cause of inflated ratings, and (2) those who view the licensing power given to credit ratings agencies by regulatory rules requiring an investment grade ratingfrom an NRSRO rating agency as creating a de facto monopoly that precludes competition. After reviewing the recent em- pirical literature on how ratings became inflated, this Article agrees with the former school and doubts that serious reform is possible unless the conflicts of interest inherent in the "issuer pays model" can be reduced.Although the licens- ing power hypothesis can explain the contemporary lack of competition in the ratings industry, increasedcompetition is more likely to aggravate than alleviate the problem of inflated ratings.