Sobre las agencias de credito financiero

Should governments get involved in the redefinition of the rating criteria used by rating companies for the stock market in order to provide a safer environment for investors?
At the beginning of the 90’s decade, the United States financial system discovered what is now known as the Alternative banking system. By this we refer to a new path to finance operations that, inside the traditionalbanking system, would have been impossible. Investors varied from banks, companies, private individuals, etc. All benefited from the derivatives business that guaranteed them a certain price to buy or sell shares up to an specific time in the future. This system was created through the use of securitization techniques. Through the creation of bonds, this relied upon payments of other portfolios. Inpractical terms, this is based in the use of the payments from a pool of assets or a portfolio to issue bonds, then the organization can sell these bonds and from the money raised by this sale organization obtain enough financing to perform new operations. This creates a group of securitized bonds.
Banks use and used this method to create Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS). They sought to increasetheir operation capacity and leverage. This same system was used by banks and financing corporations to create a subprime mortgage system. Explanation: people had mortgages, and institutions had thousands of this structured products. So what they did was to pack them up in the previously mentioned MBS’s. These are divided into tranches that depend on the levels of risk and the potential earningsto receive a grade from a Credit Rating Institution. With this grade on mind, the investors buy the MBS, but they didn’t see the low risk or the earnings; the business was that the best rated tranches were paid before the lower grade ones by the end of the month, so if all loaner were able to pay, everyone received payment, yet if only a part was capable of paying, then only the best rated receivedtheir payment. So we can understand what trait of the tranches the investors relied on to use their money in. Financial institutions were unhappy about having so many low rated tranches on the MSB system, so they decided to repack all these tranches into a new system of investment which they called the collateralized debt obligation CDO system, inside a subprime mortgage. With these new groupsof low rated investments, they could join the profit obtained from those loaners and aim to obtain a better grade out of this tranches. So, again the CRA had to rate these, according the risk and potential income this bonds represented. We are talking about low rated MBS grouped into a new type that depended on the payments of the high risk tranches. As an additional note we insist on the risk ofthese new packages and on the fact that the whole financial system inside this packages and bonds depended entirely on the payments of the homeowners not defaulting all at once. The most important detail of this mangled system was the following: financial institutions depended, as holders depended on homeowners, on the credit rating agencies’ ratings to be able to sell their bond packages.
Acredit rating agency is a firm that provides its opinion on the creditworthiness of an entity and the financial obligations(such as bonds, preferred stock, and commercial paper) issued by an entity(SEC). they usually rate them, in general terms, as the ones deserving an investment grade and the ones that don’t. In other words, they were created with one purpose: provideinvestors with usefulinformation regarding credit risk, conveying it with an alpha-numeric rating system, this being AAA, BBB, CCC, Aaa, so on. The Securities and Exchanges Comission decided to register, regulate and overseer them. In 1975, in order to avoid inflated ratings, they designated some of these agencies as Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations(NRSROs), recognizing solely their ratings for...