June 8, 2011
-The rules are not tough enough. More needs to be done to separate the rating agencies from the instruments that they rate. The rules should insist that credit rating agencies cannot be compensated by the companies they rate or the companies that float the bonds that they rate. So far as I have been able to tell, through the entire banking crisis the rating agencies rated derivative after derivative AAA without regard to the actual credit worthiness of the instruments.
There needs to be a much stricter rules so that credit ratings can regain creditability. Right now, such credit ratings are a joke and as an individual investor I simply ignore them.