The Role of Rating Agencies in Financial Crises

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2010 in the subject Economics - International Economic Relations, grade: 2.0, University of Osnabrück, language: English, abstract: To understand the roots of the capital markets and the rating agencies I want to start this Bachelor Thesis with a historical development. With introduction of the Issuer Pays Model and the proclamation of so called NRSROs there is the starting point for a long time discussion within the credit rating industry. Then I want to introduce the case of Enron, a former energy conglomerate which has been wrongly rated by the rating agencies. I want to investigate if there are any parallels to the crisis of 2007. I also want to understand and show the reasons and the structure of the crisis of 2007. So I will introduce the Subprime market and structured finance, as these topics were probably the triggers for the crisis. The main part of my thesis is to find an explanation for the performance of the credit rating agencies. I use a theoretical model which stresses the complexity of assets. The model says that the more complex an asset is, the harder it is to rate for the agencies. In opposite to that I want to compare the results of the theoretical model with an empirical study. I want to investigate if the theoretical model gets the same result as the empirical approach or if there are huge differences. At last I want to introduce some solution proposals by myself and think about further approaches.