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(詳細はCredit rating agencies (CRAs) — firms which rate debt instruments/securities according to the debtor's ability to pay lenders back — played a significant role at various stages in the American subprime mortgage crisis of 2007-2008 that led to the Great Recession of 2008-2009. The new, complex securities of "structured finance" used to finance subprime mortgages could not have been sold without ratings by the "Big Three" rating agencies — Moody's Investors Service, Standard & Poor's, and Fitch Ratings. A large section of the debt securities market — many money markets and pension funds — were restricted in their bylaws to holding only the safest securities — i.e securities the rating agencies designated "triple-A".〔 The pools of debt the agencies gave their highest ratings to 〔(the raw material of the debt securities)〕 included over three trillion dollars of loans to homebuyers with bad credit and undocumented incomes through 2007. Hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of these triple-A securities were downgraded to "junk" status by 2010,〔McLean, Bethany and Joe Nocera. ''All the Devils Are Here, the Hidden History of the Financial Crisis'', Portfolio, Penguin, 2010 (p.111)〕〔$300 billion collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) issued in 2005-2007 (over half of the CDOs by value during that time period) that rating agencies gave their highest "triple-A" rating to, were written-down to "junk" by the end of 2009. (source:)〕 and the writedowns and losses came to over half a trillion dollars.〔〔 This led "to the collapse or disappearance" in 2008-9 of three major investment banks (Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch), and the federal governments buying of $700 billion of bad debt from distressed financial institutions. ==Impact on the crisis== Credit rating agencies came under scrutiny following the mortgage crisis for giving investment-grade, "money safe" ratings to securitized mortgages (in the form of securities known as mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and collateralized debt obligations (CDO)) based on "non-prime"—subprime or Alt-A -- mortgages loans. Demand for the securities was stimulated by the large global pool of fixed income investments which had doubled from $36 trillion in 2000 to $70 trillion by 2006—more than annual global spending—and the low interest rates from competing fixed income securities, made possible by the low interest rate policy of the US Federal Reserve Bank for much of that period These high ratings encouraged the flow of global investor funds into these securities funding the housing bubble in the US.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Credit rating agencies and the subprime crisis」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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