Rating the Raters

On a day that saw one of those unaccountable ratings agencies downgrade Spain again, thereby pushing the lives of ordinary Spanish citizens ever closer to economic chaos, it occurred to me that what we need right now is an agency to rate the performance of the ratings agencies. After all, if these entirely unelected and unregulated bodies, which are answerable to nobody, are to go around making economic pronouncements which can undermine democratically elected governments, shouldn't we have some way of knowing how accurate their advice is? Let's not forget that, before the big financial meltdown, these agencies were giving positive ratings to many of the investments and financial products which subsequently went belly up. So, it could be argued that, encouraging banks and financial institutions to put their/our money into these bad investments, the ratings agencies were actually pivotal in precipitating the current financial crisis. A crisis they are worsening with their continued threats to downgrade banks, national debts and the like.

It's this kind of information we need to have access, so that when a ratings agency next makes a threat to downgrade a country's debt, the government in question can come to our rating agency to see how we rate the original ratings agency's ratings. They can then make an informed decision - based on the agency's past performance - as whether to take the threat seriously. When it comes to the ratings structure itself, I think we need to keep it simple. None of that complicated 'triple A', 'triple A plus', 'B minus' and 'double D' bollocks the credit ratings agencies use. I propose we just stick to 'High Grade', 'Medium Grade', 'Highly Speculative' and 'Utter Shite'. I'm guessing the last will be the most prevalent, based on what we already know. But seriously, it really is about time we did something to start fighting back against these bastards. The sooner the, and all the other grasping corporate bastards, realise that capitalism has failed, the better.