To the Brink of Destruction

America's Rating Agencies and Financial Crisis

Timothy J. Sinclair

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781501760242
• eBook ISBN: 9781501760259
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Finance
• Index: Business

To the Brink of Destruction exposes how America's rating agencies helped generate the global financial crisis of 2007 and beyond, surviving and thriving in the aftermath. Despite widespread scrutiny, rating agencies continued to operate on the same business model and wield extraordinary power, exerting extensive influence over public policy.

Timothy J. Sinclair brings the shadowy corners of this story to life by examining congressional testimony, showing how the wheels of accountability turned—and ultimately failed—during the crisis. He asks how and why the agencies risked their lucrative franchise by aligning so closely with a process of financial innovation that came undone during the crisis. What he finds is that key institutions, including the agencies, changed from being judges to being advocates years before the crisis, eliminating a vital safety valve meant to hinder financial excess.

Sinclair's well-researched investigation offers a clear, accessible explanation of structured finance and how it works. To the Brink of Destruction avoids tired accusations, instead providing novel insight into the role rating agencies played in the worst crisis of modern global capitalism.

1

Introduction

The story of the credit rating agencies is a story of a colossal failure. The credit rating agencies occupy a special place in our financial markets. Millions of investors rely on them for independent objective assessments. The rating agencies broke this bond of trust … The result is that our entire financial system is now at risk.

—US Representative Henry A. Waxman, 2008

Given the anger generated by the institutional failures and bailouts that were features of the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, you might think many of the organizations involved must have ceased to exist, or at the very least been substantially reformed, making a repeat of the crisis impossible.

But you would be wrong. Yes, Bear Stearns has gone, and Lehman Brothers is, of course, no more. But, like Fannie Mae, the Federal National Mortgage Association, Freddie Mac, the Federal Home Loan Corporation, and most of the banks, the major American credit rating agencies are still there, at the heart of Wall Street and the global financial system, and they remain substantially unreformed. Despite being referred to as “essential cogs in the wheel of financial destruction,” their business model is the same as it was before the crisis, and their analytical processes do not differ greatly from what they were years ago.¹ They have not been replaced by alternative systems, and what they do is as important today as it was before the crisis. Maybe more so.

Moody’s Investors Service (Moody’s), Standard & Poor’s, currently branded as S&P Global Ratings (S&P), and Fitch Ratings (Fitch) have been at the center of the bond markets since the early years of the twentieth century. In recent decades the lower cost of debt financing in those markets challenged the traditional role of banks as corporate lenders, giving rise to the astonishing wave of financial innovation by the banks that helped create the global financial crisis beginning in 2007. The rating agencies played a significant role in this drama. Most people seem to believe the agencies simply inflated the ratings of bonds supported by housing debt, so they could be paid handsome fees by the issuers of those bonds. Understanding what the agencies really did, and why, and how they survived the ignominy of their involvement in the crisis is the purpose of this book.

Rating agencies are enigmas. Many think they can be understood using the same ideas and tools applied to banks and other financial institutions, but this has proven elusive. The agencies are not financial institutions. The core of their business is not a series of financial transactions on which they hope to show a profit. They do not provide financing, take deposits, or trade on their own account. The business of the agencies is looking into the future and offering a view of the likelihood of repayment by the issuers of bonds to potential investors. To do this, they must think about all the relevant circumstances, the capacity to repay by the issuers of the bonds, and their willingness to repay (as opposed to using those funds for some other purpose).

In selling their services the agencies are really selling confidence in themselves as experts about what is likely to happen in the future. This element makes all the difference because it means those who use ratings, even if those ratings prove not to be effective estimations of the future, can always suggest they were buying the best expertise available to them at the time. Contrast this with a financial transaction, where proof is in the bottom line.

Consequences

There is no doubt the events that began in 2007 were, short of military invasion, a pandemic like COVID-19 or famine, about as dramatic as it gets in the world of the twenty-first century. Banks failed, they were bailed out, and governments were indebted by bailing them out. It became very hard to borrow money even for the most creditworthy of potential borrowers in the months following the Lehman collapse on September 15, 2008. Governments considered all manner of possible responses to the situation. After two decades or more of globalization, here were Western governments rescuing the financial markets as had not happened since the 1930s.

The crisis generated considerable fear and hostility toward financial institutions, and for a time, perhaps in 2009 when world trade was at a low ebb, it seemed like systemic change was likely. Stimulus packages in China and the United States slowly revived world trade and growth. Efforts to consider what went wrong in the United States and in Europe did produce calls for wholesale change. But talk is cheap.

There was a good deal of questioning of the prevailing frameworks that guide policy and market institutions. But these ways of thinking proved remarkably resistant to criticism. This is not necessarily due to their merits, but because other ways of thinking about markets have been marginalized since the Thatcher and Reagan administrations in the 1980s. Rather than stimulating an intellectual revolution in how we view finance, coupled with the founding of new institutions and better conceived, more structurally sound market rules, the response to the crisis has largely consisted of an effort to slow down and contain finance, with the hope that these new burdens will somehow bring better financial behavior.

The rating agencies illustrate this response well. Many options were floated for the future of the agencies, including the establishment of a new international organization to undertake ratings, new business models, and new analytical models for the agencies. What we have seen instead is a reinvigoration of oversight, the codification of criteria, and the establishment of many new regulatory burdens focused on information provision by the agencies. While the agencies complain about these burdens, the business models of the agencies remain unchanged, and how they come to their judgments remains their own business, with no substantial interference from outside parties, including government agencies in the United States and Europe. While rating agencies are certainly chastened by the crisis—they experienced extensive criticism and were challenged repeatedly to account for their dealings, as I show in chapter 5—they are still there, they still make lots of money, and while what they do is watched more closely now, they still have the independence they had before the crisis, and their role has not been seriously reduced.

Bad, Bad, Bad

Like the rating agencies, the financial crisis that started in 2007 remains an enigma. By now, most people think they know what that crisis was all about and how it was caused. The popular account focuses on bad behavior by bad people in bad institutions.² Because of greed, and because people did not do their jobs properly, money was lent to people who could not possibly pay it back. Part of the blame for the crisis is attributed to those seeking to finance a home. Lending to subprime borrowers—those whose credit history or circumstances (such as lack of employment) meant they could not borrow at normal or prime rates—was a mistake, and as soon as these mortgages started to fail the financial system came unstuck.

Banks (of all types) were bad too. Banks and other mortgage originators should not have lent to these borrowers, and government should not have condoned this process via implicit support for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the US government–sponsored housing enterprises. The financial innovation built on subprime by investment banks was excessive and would inevitably bring disaster, according to this now commonsense view. As soon as people realized housing prices would not keep rising indefinitely in the United States, this house of cards started to collapse. Assets became toxic or unsaleable. Institutions whose balance sheets were suddenly dominated by these toxic assets had to be supported by the taxpayer to avoid collapse. These government bailouts stimulated deep public unhappiness with politics and the banking system.

According to this account, the rating agencies were key players in the germination of the financial crisis. The job of the agencies is to provide impartial information and make judgments about the likely repayment of securities in the future. The agencies have made many mistakes about this in the past. Perhaps their most spectacular error was the rating of Enron Corporation, which filed for bankruptcy on December 2, 2001. In this case, the agencies missed the intricate financial engineering that supported Enron. The agencies were also guilty of being slow to adapt and of being not nearly as smart as they should have been about financial innovation. In the established view, the agencies were, like the mortgage originators, the investment banks, and subprime borrowers, greedy, irresponsible, and inept.³

Because the agencies obtained their income from the fees paid by issuers of bonds for the rating of their debt, the agencies had strong incentives to rate anything presented to them positively, according to this line of thinking. This relationship suggested to many that the agencies have a conflict of interest because they are paid to rate bonds by the issuers of those bonds, who normally want the highest ratings they can get.⁴

The widely held view suggests that the agencies provided inflated ratings for the bonds associated with subprime lending. Given that many subprime borrowers had low or unstable incomes, or a history of financial problems, for many observers it makes no sense that some of the bonds associated with subprime lending were rated AAA. Giving these bonds such strong ratings must somehow reflect deep corruption in the rating business.⁵

The rating agencies were no longer providing unbiased opinions, the conventional wisdom suggests. They were going after maximum income just like everybody else associated with the real estate market at the time. Once people realized these ratings were inflated there was a crisis on Wall Street as counterparties—financial institutions engaged in trading financial securities with each other—no longer had confidence the financial instruments they had invested in were sound.

More recently, grafted onto the drama and emotion of these accounts have been insights into some of the key mechanisms of the crisis provided by acute observers such as Michael Lewis.⁶ The effect of this work has been to create a wider appreciation of the degree to which the opaqueness and connectedness of complex financial instruments were at the core of the Wall Street crisis.

A Different View

As a step toward understanding the role of the rating agencies, this book offers a different view of what gave rise to the financial crisis that began in 2007.⁷ The key difference between the account of the crisis offered here, and the usual story, is that in my understanding crisis is a normal, if not daily, event in financial markets. Crisis should not be understood as aberrant and exogenous, but as endogenous, as being caused by the markets themselves. The problem with most conventional understandings of the global financial crisis is that they make markets into utopias that are self-regulating and not subject to failure. As a result, these accounts cannot acknowledge the endogenous nature of market crises. In the conventional account, crises only occur because people do bad or illegal things, or because there is some defect or “failure” in institutions, perhaps caused by government. Crises are therefore exogenous to markets, reflecting problems external to them. Markets cannot be blamed for crises.

Although people do bad things, institutions fail, and governments mess things up, this is not at the core of what happened to bring about the global financial crisis. A key feature of the financial markets is a perpetual search for yield on assets. When interest rates are low, as they were in the years following the dot-com bust of 2000/2001, financial markets tend to look for better returns in new places and new ways. At various points in the past this led to a flow of funds from the rich countries to emerging markets where higher returns were available. But the political uncertainties associated with these flows were always problematic because the willingness to repay was open to doubt.

Rather than the search for yield leading to an external flow, this time around resources went into financial innovation in the United States. That innovation was associated with risk management in the mortgage finance business. This risk management consisted of removing the risk of default on these mortgages from the books of mortgage lenders through a process called securitization. This process, which involved making the financial flows from illiquid assets like car loans, credit card receivables, and home mortgages into liquid, tradeable bonds, strengthened the balance sheets of the mortgage lenders or originators, allowing them to lend even more to house buyers, and created a new pool of financial assets, such as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), which could be traded between financial institutions, providing opportunities for arbitrage, or buying in one market and selling in another, by investment banks.⁸ In a context of low interest rates and the hunt for yield, structured finance grew to around $10.7 trillion in value at its height. This...

Table of contents

• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Agencies and What They Do
• 3. How to Think about the Agencies
• 4. The Agencies and Financial Innovation
• 5. Cogs in the Wheel of Financial Destruction
• 6. Aftermath
• 7. Addendum
• 8. I’ll Be Gone. You’ll Be Gone.
• Index