IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-0-230-25086-4_24.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

The Ratings Agencies — More Perfect Information?

In: The Fear Factor

Author

Listed:
  • Colin Read

    (SUNY College)

Abstract

Risk assessment is a highly technical problem. If each bond investor was to try to estimate the downside risk of each asset under consideration, it would be likely that few investors would be qualified to buy bonds or other risk bearing fixed income securities. If such were the case, those issuing the bonds would have few buyers, and would then have to offer a commensurately higher interest rate to attract sufficient interest and raise sufficient capital. With such uncertainty and such an advantage to most skilled analyses, it would be smart for the bond issuers or investment houses marketing the bond issues to hire a risk-assessment agent to analyze the proposed security and give it a letter grade that would signal the level of risk to the marketplace. This is the job of the ratings agencies.

Suggested Citation

  • Colin Read, 2009. "The Ratings Agencies — More Perfect Information?," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: The Fear Factor, chapter 23, pages 184-187, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-25086-4_24
    DOI: 10.1057/9780230250864_24
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-25086-4_24. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.