Oct 23, 2007

Chanos on the rating agencies

The rating agency system breaks down when most needed. Rely on it at your own peril.
Time and again, when confronted with negative financial "surprises" by corporate issuers during the last decade, the "independent" ratings agencies fell down on the job. This kept slow-on-the-uptake investors dancing on the decks of numerous financial Titanics, while those heeding other signals (such as the burgeoning market for credit-default derivatives) prepared to man the lifeboats.

Whether it was the hubris of not wanting to precipitate a run on the bank (as if it wasn't happening already!), or the incompetence of one ratings agency analyst admitting to not having read the company's SEC filings, the shortcomings of an analyst-based ratings agency system became apparent in the Enron fiasco. Market-based price-discovery agents, such as short sellers in the equity market and purchasers of credit-default insurance in the bond/derivative markets, supplanted the Big Three ratings agencies as accurate predictors of Enron's financial distress.

~ James Chanos, "Short-Lived Lessons From an Enron Short," The Wall Street Journal, May 30, 2006

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