Problems with credit rating agencies

Back at the height of the Global Financial Crisis I mused about the role of the credit ratings agencies in the crisis in accentuating the upswing and downswing. I wondered if they could survive the fiasco.

I was wrong, of course. I was reminded of this by a somewhat wry post by Stephen Grenville, The perverse logic of rating agencies, in the Lowy Institute blog. Stephen is a former Deputy Governor of Australia's Reserve Bank.

When the the agencies first became important I thought that they played a useful role. Instead, they have become a market distortion in their own right.