Ratings, Rating Agencies and the Global Financial System brings together the research of economists at New York University and the University of Maryland, along with those from the private sector, government bodies, and other universities. The first section of the volume focuses on the historical origins of the credit rating business and its present day industrial organization structure. The second section presents several empirical studies crafted largely around individual firm-level or bank-level data. These studies examine (a) the relationship between ratings and the default and recovery experience of corporate borrowers, (b) the comparability of credit ratings made by domestic and foreign rating agencies, and (c) the usefulness of financial market indicators for rating banks, among other topics. In the third section, the record of sovereign credit ratings in predicting financial crises and the reaction of financial markets to changes in credit ratings is examined. The final section of the volume emphasizes policy issues now facing regulators and credit rating agencies.

The business of credit ratings began in the United States in the early 1900s. Over time, credit ratings have gradually taken on an expanding role, both in the United States and abroad and in official financial market regulation as well as in private capital market decisions. However, in 1999 the Bank for International Settlements (through its Committee on Banking Supervision) proposed rule changes that would provide an explicit role for credit ratings in determining a bank's required regulatory risk capital. Once implemented, this BIS proposal (often referred to as Basel 2) would vastly elevate the importance of credit ratings by linking the required measure of bank capital to the credit rating of the bank's obligors. With these regulatory changes under active discussion, research into the role for ratings and rating agencies in the global financial system is particularly apropos.
Ratings, Rating Agencies and the Global Financial System brings together the research of economists at New York University and the University of Maryland, along with those from the private sector, government bodies, and other universities. The first section of the volume focuses on the historical origins of the credit rating business and its present day industrial organization structure. The second section presents several empirical studies crafted largely around individual firm-level or bank-level data. These studies examine (a) the relationship between ratings and the default and recovery experience of corporate borrowers, (b) the comparability of credit ratings made by domestic and foreign rating agencies, and (c) the usefulness of financial market indicators for rating banks, among other topics. In thethird section, the record of sovereign credit ratings in predicting financial crises and the reaction of financial markets to changes in credit ratings is examined. The final section of the volume emphasizes policy issues now facing regulators and credit rating agencies.

Ever since the European currency crises of 1992-93, the Mexican crisis of 1994-95, and especially the Asian/global crisis of 1997-98, there has been heightened interest in early warning signals of financial crises. This pathbreaking study presents a comprehensive battery of empirical tests on the performance of alternative early warning indicators for emerging-market economies that should prove useful in the construction of a more effective global warning system.

Not only are the authors able to draw conclusions about which specific indicators have sent the most reliable early warning signals of currency and banking crises in emerging economies, they also test the out-of-sample performance of the model during the Asian crisis and find that it does a good job of identifying the most vulnerable economies. In addition, they show how the early warning system can be used to construct a "composite" crisis indicator to weigh the importance of alternative channels of cross-country "contagion" of crises and to generate information on the recovery path from crises.

This timely study comes on the eve of impending changes at the International Monetary Fund as that institution reexamines how it reacts to financial crises. Moreover, the study provides" ...a wealth of valuable elements for anyone investigating and forecasting adverse developments in emerging markets as well as industrial countries, " according to Ewoud Schuitemaker, Vice President of the Economics Department at ABN AMRO Bank, which is developing a Macroeconomic Risk System of its own to identify risks of macroeconomic downturn on a country basis for some 75 countries.

This book presents evidence that public debts in the advanced economies have surged in recent years to levels not recorded since the end of World War II, surpassing the heights reached during the First World War and the Great Depression. At the same time, private debt levels, particularly those of financial institutions and households, are in uncharted territory and are (in varying degrees) a contingent liability of the public sector in many countries. Historically, high leverage episodes have been associated with slower economic growth and a higher incidence of default or, more generally, restructuring of public and private debts.A more subtle form of debt restructuring in the guise of "financial repression" (which had its heyday during the tightly regulated Bretton Woods system) also importantly facilitated sharper and more rapid debt reduction than would have otherwise been the case from the late 1940s to the 1970s. It is conjectured here that the pressing needs of governments to reduce debt rollover risks and curb rising interest expenditures in light of the substantial debt overhang (combined with the widespread "official aversion" to explicit restructuring) are leading to a revival of financial repression-including more directed lending to government by captive domestic audiences (such as pension funds), explicit or implicit caps on interest rates, and tighter regulation on cross-border capital movements.