Institutional Failure and the Global Financial Crisis

Timothy J. Sinclair

Who could have imagined the obscure, arcane business of debt rating would become—in the context of the worst economic andﬁnancial crisis since the Great Depression—a matter for serious public comment by presidents and prime ministers? Rating agency ofﬁcials are used to their work being discussed at length in theﬁnancial press, often with a mixture of awe and contempt. The awe is derived from the inﬂuence rating has had on the interest premiums paid by corporations and governments and by the cash-rich nature of the rating business prior to theﬁnancial crisis. The contempt seems to be driven by a view on Wall Street that the people who work in the agencies are second-raters, not good enough for the once-mighty investment banks. Raters are, however, not used to being the subject of mainstream media attention.

The often vitriolic public debate about the role of the rating agencies in the generation of the subprime crisis has revolved around an idea which now seems deeply entrenched in popular,ﬁnancial market and academic under-standings of the agencies and their incentives. A major element of this think-ing is that how the agencies are regulated generates problems for the quality of the ratings they produce. In this chapter, I argue that the concern with regulation of the rating agencies is largely mistaken. Regulation is concerned with the“rules of the road,”not with the design of the road itself. The road is the problem, not the rules we invent to govern it, as I show in what follows.

I begin this chapter with a short review of the agencies, their history, and how they function. This is followed by an examination of the role the rating agencies play in the New Global Finance (NGF). The chapter then considers ﬁnancial crisis: perspectives on crisis, a history of crises, and the current crisis that began in the summer of 2007, including the issue of blame. I follow this

with some discussion of the regulatory response, such as it has been. I then argue that the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) is not a result of rule transgres-sion, but is a crisis at the level of the social relationships which make global ﬁnance possible. This is why the crisis is so deep and why it is so hard to develop a response by policymakers and market actors. The nature of this crisis transcended the very deﬁnition of crisis as understood by these actors.

Where Do Rating Agencies Come From?

The energetic reaction of Europeanﬁnancial regulators to the perceived cul-pability of the agencies in the generation of the subprime crisis points to the increasingly important job done by wholesale credit rating agencies in global markets. In fact, it was not too many years ago that rating agencies were little known outside the United States. Until the mid-1990s, most European and Asian companies relied on their market reputations alone to secureﬁnancing.

But this changed when the pressure of globalization led to the desire to tap the deep Americanﬁnancial markets and to a greater appetite for higher returns (and thus risk). In these circumstances, the informality of the traditional old boys’networks is no longer defendable to shareholders or relevant to pension funds half way around the world. The result is that an essentially American approach to market organization and judgment has become the global norm in the developed world, and increasingly, in emerging markets as well.

Ratings have become increasingly central to the regulatory system of mod-ern capitalism and therefore to govmod-ernments. Getting credit ratings“right”

therefore seems vitally important to many observers. But in pursuing improve-ment in the rating system we need to appreciate the challenges and limits to rating. The increasingly volatile nature of markets has created a crisis in relations between the agencies and governments, which increasingly seek to monitor their performance and stimulate reform in their procedures. Given the inherent challenges in rating it must seem paradoxical that rating is growing in importance as an approach to information problems in a variety of contexts outside theﬁnancial markets (Sinclair, 2005). This form of regula-tion is increasingly important in health, educaregula-tion, and many other commer-cial activities.

Rating agencies emerged after the Civil War in the United States. From this time until World War I, Americanﬁnancial markets experienced an explosion of information provision. The transition between issuing compendiums of information and actually making judgments about the creditworthiness of debtors occurred after the 1907ﬁnancial crisis and before the Pujo hearings of 1912. By the mid-1920s, 100 percent of the US municipal bond market was rated by Moody’s. The growth of the bond rating industry subsequently

occurred in a number of phases. Up to the 1930s, and the separation of the banking and securities businesses in the United States with passage of the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933, bond rating was aﬂedgling activity. Rating entered a period of rapid growth and consolidation with this separation and institu-tionalization of the securities business after 1929, and rating became a stan-dard requirement to sell any debt issue in the United States after many state governments incorporated rating standards into their prudential rules for investment by pension funds. A series of defaults by major sovereign bor-rowers, including Germany, made the bond business largely a US one from the 1930s to the 1980s, dominated by American blue chip industrial ﬁrms and municipalities (Tofﬂer, 1990: 43–57). The third period of rating development began in the 1980s, as a market in junk or low-rated bonds developed. This market—a feature of the newly released energies ofﬁnancial speculation—saw many new entrants participate in the capital markets.

Two major American agencies dominate the market in ratings. Both Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s (S&P) are headquartered in the lower Manhattanﬁnancial district of New York City. Moody’s was sold in 1998 as a separate corporation by Dun and Bradstreet, the information concern, which had owned Moody’s since 1962, while S&P remains a subsidiary of publishers McGraw-Hill, which bought S&P in 1966. Both agencies have numerous branches in the United States, in other developed countries, and in several emerging markets. S&P is famous for the S&P 500, the benchmark US stock index listing around $1 trillion in assets. Other agencies include Fitch Ratings and the Dominion Bond Rating Service.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, rating agencies began to charge fees to bond issuers to pay for ratings. Bothﬁrms have fee incomes of several hundred million dollars a year, making it difﬁcult for even the largest issuer to manipu-late them through their revenues. Moreover, issuing inﬂated ratings would diminish the reputation of the major agencies, and reputation is the very basis of their franchise. Rating agency outputs comprise an important part of the infrastructure of capital markets. They are key benchmarks in the marketplace, which form the basis for subsequent decision-making by participants. In this sense, rating agencies are important not so much for any particular rating they produce, but for the fact that they are a part of the internal organization of the market itself. So, we ﬁnd that traders may refer to a company as an

“AA company,”or some other rating category, as if this were a fact, an agreed and uncontroversial way of describing and distinguishing companies, muni-cipalities, or countries.

A rationalist way to think about what rating agencies do is to see them as serving a“function” in the economic system. In this view, rating agencies solve a problem in markets that develops when banks no longer sit at the center of the borrowing process. Rating agencies serve as what Gourevitch

calls “reputational intermediaries” like accountants, analysts, and lawyers, who are“essential to the functioning of the system,”monitoring managers through a“constantﬂow of short-term snapshots”(Gourevitch, 2002: 1, 11).

Another way to think about the function of the agencies is to suggest rating agencies establish psychological “rules of thumb”which make market deci-sions less costly for participants (Heisler, 1994: 78).

But purely functional explanations for the existence of rating agencies are deceptive. Attempts to verify (or refute) the idea that rating agencies must exist because they serve a purpose have proven inconclusive. Rating agen-cies have to be considered important actors because people view them as important, and act on the basis of that understanding in markets, even if it proves impossible for analysts to actually isolate the speciﬁc beneﬁts the agencies generate for these market actors. Investors often mimic other investors, “ignoring substantive private information” (Scharfstein and Stein, 1990: 465). The fact that people may collectively view rating agencies as important—irrespective of what “function” the agencies are thought to serve in the scholarly literature—means that markets and debt issuers have strong incentives to act as if participants in the markets take the rating agencies seriously. In other words, the signiﬁcance of rating is not to be estimated like a mountain or national population, as a“brute”fact which is true (or not) irrespective of shared beliefs about its existence, nor is the meaning of rating determined by the “subjective” facts of individual per-ception (Ruggie, 1998: 12–13). What is central to the status and consequen-tiality of rating agencies is what people believe about them, and act on collectively—even if those beliefs are clearly false. Indeed, the beliefs may be quite strange to the observer, but if people use them as a guide to action (or inaction) they are signiﬁcant. Dismissing such collective beliefs misses the fact that actors must take account of the existence of social facts in considering their own action. Reﬂection about the nature and direction of social facts is characteristic of ﬁnancial markets on a day-to-day basis.

Rating agencies are important in investment most immediately because there is a collective belief that says the agencies are important, which people act upon, as if it were “true.” Whether rating agencies actually add new information to the process does not negate their signiﬁcance, under-stood in these terms.

Rating agencies operate in a speciﬁc context. The NGF is a form of social organization in which rating agencies and other reputational intermediaries assume a new importance. Bank lending is familiar to us. Banks traditionally acted asﬁnancial intermediaries, bringing together borrowers and lenders of funds. They borrowed money, in the form of deposits, and lent money at their own risk to borrowers. However, in recent years, disintermediation has occurred on both sides of the balance sheet. Depositors have found more

attractive things to do with their money at the same time as borrowers have increasingly borrowed from nonbank sources. The reasons for this develop-ment seem to lie in the heightened competitive pressures generated by globalization, and the high overhead costs of the bank intermediation infra-structure. Disintermediation is at the center of the NGF. It is changing what banks are, and creating an information problem for suppliers and users of funds. In a bank-intermediated environment, lenders depend on the pruden-tial behavior of banks, which are regulated and required to maintain a certain proportion of reserves. However, in a disintermediatedﬁnancial environment, those with funds must make their own judgments about the likelihood of repayment by borrowers. Given the high costs of gathering suitable informa-tion with which to make an assessment by individual investors, it is no surprise that institutions have developed to solve the information problem in capital markets by providing centralized judgments on creditworthiness.

The growth of rating has a number of central features. Globalization is the most obvious characteristic. As noted, cheaper, more efﬁcient capital markets now challenge the commercial positions of banks everywhere. The New York-based rating agencies have grown rapidly to meet demand for their services in newly disintermediating capital markets. Second, innovation inﬁnancial instruments is a major feature. Derivatives and structuredﬁnancings, among other things, place a lot of stress on the existing analytical systems and out-puts of the agencies, which are developing new rating scales and expertise in order to meet these changes. The demand for timely information is greater than ever. Third, competition in the rating industry has started to accelerate for the ﬁrst time in decades. The basis for this competition lies in niche specialization (e.g., Fitch Ratings in municipals and ﬁnancial institutions) and in the“better treatment” of issuers by smallerﬁrms. The global rating agencies, especially Moody’s, are sometimes characterized as high-handed, or in other ways deﬁcient in surveys of both issuers and investors.

How Do We Understand Financial Crisis?

It is possible to distinguish two main ways of understandingﬁnancial crises that compete for scholarly and political preeminence. Theﬁrst of these has dominated economic thought aboutﬁnance for thirty years and has had a major inﬂuence on policymakers. This stream of thought I call the exogenous approach toﬁnancial crisis. Although invoking Adam Smith, this tradition’s modern founders include Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman. Their views are associated with attacks on the mixed economy model of state intervention popular in much of the developed world after the Great Depres-sion of the 1930s. These thinkers took it as axiomatic that markets, when left

to their own devices, are efﬁcient allocators of resources. For them,ﬁnancial crisis is a deviation from the normal state of the market. Given they assume markets work efﬁciently, this tradition focuses on“external”causes, especially government failure, as the cause of crisis. Friedman, for example, blamed the Great Depression of the 1930s on what he considered to be incorrect Federal Reserve policy in 1929 and 1930, rather than the effects of the stock market crash in October 1929 (Kindleberger and Aliber, 2005: 72).

Exogenous accounts ofﬁnancial crisis assume market participants are con-stantly adjusting their behavior—for example, whether they buy or sell ﬁnan-cial instruments like bonds and stocks—based on new information from outside the market. In this context, market prices are assumed to always reﬂect what other market participants are prepared to pay. If this is the case, reason exogenous thinkers, prices are never inﬂated or false. They must always be correct. So the idea of a“bubble economy,”in which assets like houses, stocks, and oil futures deviate from true value to a higher, false value, is rejected.

There can be no“true value”other than what the market is prepared to pay.

The endogenous account, with which I am sympathetic, says thatﬁnancial crises begin primarily insideﬁnance. For Marx and Polanyi, crises are caused by the internal“laws of motion”of capitalism. These produce constant change and upheaval, not equilibrium between demand and supply. For Keynes, the

“animal spirits”or passions of speculation give rise to risky behavior. Typical of the endogenous perspective is the idea that market traders do not merely integrate information coming from outside the markets in the wider, real economy, but are focused on what other traders are doing, in an effort to anticipate their buy/sell activities and thus make money from them (or at least avoid losing more money than the market average). Given this, rumors, norms, and other features of social life are part of their understanding of how ﬁnance works. On this account,ﬁnance is subject to the pathologies of social life, like any other activity in which humans engage. This is an image ofﬁnance far from the self-regulating conception that characterizes the exogenous view.

Keynes provided what remains perhaps the best intuitive illustration of the importance of this internal, social understanding of ﬁnance and ﬁnancial crises in his tabloid beauty contest metaphor,ﬁrst published in 1936 (Akerlof and Shiller, 2009: 133). Keynes suggested that the essence ofﬁnance is not, as most supposed, a matter of picking the best stocks, based on an economic analysis of which should rise in value in future. Anticipating what other traders in the market were likely to do was actually more relevant. Keynes comparedﬁnance to beauty contests that ran in the popular newspapers of the time. These contests were not, as might be assumed, about picking the most attractive face. Success was achieved by estimating howotherswould vote and voting with them, although as Keynes pointed out, others would be trying to do the same, hence the complexity and volatility ofﬁnancial markets.

More speciﬁcally, in a useful synthesis of some of the writings that fall within what I have termed the endogenous approach to globalﬁnance, Coo-per has argued that the traditional assumptions made about markets and their tendency to equilibrium between demand and supply do not work for assets like houses, art, andﬁnancial instruments like stocks, bonds, and derivatives (Cooper, 2008: 9–13). In the market for goods, greater demand can be met with greater supply or higher prices. But this simple economic logic does not work for assets. Instead, demand often grows in response to price increases for assets. The “animal spirits” identiﬁed by Keynes and elaborated upon by Akerlof and Shiller do not produce stability in the market for assets like they do in the market for goods. In the absence of equilibrium, there is no limit to the expansion of market enthusiasm forﬁnancial assets or houses, producing what we have come to call a“bubble”economy. Unfortunately, as we know, bubbles tend to deﬂate in an unpredictable manner, with very negative con-sequences for economic activity.

What is the History of Financial Crises?

The history ofﬁnancial crises shows that they are always shocking events, as they typically occur after long periods of afﬂuence. The reversal crises repre-sent seems incomprehensible to those at the center of things, never mind the general public. The standard against which allﬁnancial crises are measured is, of course, the Great Depression of the 1930s. At the height of the Depression, a quarter of American workers were unemployed (Galbraith, 1997 [1955]: 168).

The New York Stock Exchange did not return to its summer 1929 value until the early 1950s, almost a quarter century after the crash of October 1929 (www.djindexes.com). However,ﬁnancial crises did not start in the twentieth century. The Dutch“tulip mania”of the 1630s, in which tulip bulbs greatly appreciated in value, is usually cited as theﬁrst boom and bust. At the time, tulips were exotic imports from the eastern Mediterranean.“Mass mania”for the bulbs led to massive price inﬂation, so that some tulip bulbs were worth the equivalent of $50,000 or more each. When the crash came and the bubble deﬂated,“not with a whimper but with a bang,”many who had invested their life savings in tulips lost everything (Galbraith, 1993: 4). Mass default ensured a depression in the Netherlands in the years after 1637 (Galbraith, 1993:

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