May 05, 2010
And they said it was impossible. The Post followed the NYT in calling for an independent agent to pick which credit rating agency will rate a company’s issues. This is the obvious and simple way to fix the basic conflict of interest involved when the company pays the rater. If the company has no control over who gets hired, then the rating agency has no incentive to lie in its assessment.
Congress was running around in circles genuflecting over various non-solutions to this problem. However, in the last couple of weeks there seems to have been an outbreak of commonsense, no doubt fueled by a Krugman column pushing the idea. I also have been pushing this one for a while, although my megaphone is not as big.
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