Moody's Ratings
Moody's Ratings is the credit ratings division of Moody's Corporation. It was known as Moody's Investors Service until March 2024, when the unit was rebranded as Moody's Ratings. Moody's Ratings provides international financial research on bonds issued by commercial and government entities. Along with Standard & Poor's and Fitch Group, Moody's is one of the Big Three credit rating agencies.
The company ranks the creditworthiness of borrowers using a standardized ratings scale which measures expected investor loss in the event of default. Moody's Ratings rates debt securities in several bond market segments. These include government, municipal and corporate bonds; managed investments such as money market funds and fixed-income funds; financial institutions including banks and non-bank finance companies; and asset classes in structured finance. In Moody's Ratings system, securities are assigned a rating from Aaa to C, with Aaa being the highest quality and C the lowest quality.
Moody's was founded by John Moody in 1909, to produce manuals of statistics related to stocks and bonds and bond ratings. In 1975, the company was identified as a Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organization by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Following several decades of ownership by Dun & Bradstreet, Moody's Investors Service became a separate company in 2000. Moody's Corporation was established as a holding company. On March 6, 2024, Moody's Investors Service was renamed to Moody's Ratings.
Role in capital markets
Together, Moody's, S&P and Fitch are sometimes referred to as the Big Three credit rating agencies. While credit rating agencies are sometimes viewed as interchangeable, Moody's, S&P and Fitch have different methodologies. All three operate worldwide, maintaining offices on six continents, and rating tens of trillions of dollars in securities.Moody's Ratings and its close competitors play a key role in global capital markets as supplementary, third-party providers of credit analysis used by banks and other investors when assessing the credit risk of particular securities. This form of third party analysis is particularly useful for smaller and less sophisticated investors, as well as for all investors to use as an external comparison for their own judgments.
Credit rating agencies also play an important role in the laws and regulations of the United States and several other countries, such as those of the European Union. In the United States their credit ratings are used in regulation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations for a variety of regulatory purposes. Among the effects of regulatory use was to enable lower-rated companies to sell bond debt for the first time; their lower ratings merely distinguished them from higher-rated companies, rather than excluding them altogether, as had been the case. However, another aspect of mechanical use of ratings by regulatory agencies has been to reinforce "pro-cyclical" and "cliff effects" of downgrades. In October 2010, the Financial Stability Board created a set of "principles to reduce reliance" on credit rating agencies in the laws, regulations and market practices of G-20 member countries. Since the early 1990s, the SEC has also used NRSRO ratings in measuring the commercial paper held by money market funds.
The SEC has designated seven other firms as NRSROs, including, for example, A. M. Best, which focuses on obligations of insurance companies. Companies with which Moody's competes in specific areas include investment research company Morningstar, Inc. and publishers of financial information for investors such as Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg L.P.
Especially since the early 2000s, Moody's frequently makes its analysts available to journalists, and issues regular public statements on credit conditions. Moody's, like S&P, organizes public seminars to educate first-time securities issuers on the information it uses to analyze debt securities.
Moody's purchased a controlling share in the "climate risk data firm" Four Twenty Seven in 2019.
Moody's credit ratings
According to Moody's, the purpose of its ratings is to "provide investors with a simple system of gradation by which future relative creditworthiness of securities may be gauged". To each of its ratings from Aa through Caa, Moody's appends numerical modifiers 1, 2 and 3; the lower the number, the higher-end the rating. Aaa, Ca and C are not modified this way. As Moody's explains, its ratings are "not to be construed as recommendations", nor are they intended to be a sole basis for investment decisions. In addition, its ratings do not speak to market price, although market conditions may affect credit risk.History of Moody's
Founding and early history
Moody's traces its history back to two publishing companies established by John Moody, the inventor of modern bond credit ratings. In 1900, Moody published his first market assessment, called Moody's Manual of Industrial and Miscellaneous Securities, and established John Moody & Company. The publication provided detailed statistics relating to stocks and bonds of financial institutions, government agencies, manufacturing, mining, utilities, and food companies. It experienced early success, selling out its first print run in its first two months. By 1903, Moody's Manual was a nationally recognized publication. Moody was forced to sell his business, due to a shortage of capital, when the Panic of 1907 fueled several changes in the markets.Moody returned in 1909 with a new publication focused solely on railroad bonds, Analysis of Railroad Investments, and a new company, Moody's Analyses Publishing Company. While Moody acknowledged that the concept of bond ratings "was not entirely original" with him—he credited early bond rating efforts in Vienna and Berlin as inspiration—he was the first to publish them widely, in an accessible format. Moody was also the first to charge subscription fees to investors. In 1913 he expanded the manual's focus to include industrial firms and utilities; the new Moody's Manual offered ratings of public securities, indicated by a letter-rating system borrowed from mercantile credit-reporting firms. The following year, Moody incorporated the company as Moody's Investors Service. Other rating companies followed over the next few years, including the antecedents of the "Big Three" credit rating agencies: Poor's in 1916, Standard Statistics Company in 1922, and the Fitch Publishing Company in 1924.
Moody's expanded its focus to include ratings for U.S. state and local government bonds in 1919 and, by 1924, Moody's rated nearly the entire U.S. bond market.
1930s to mid-century
The relationship between the U.S. bond market and rating agencies developed further in the 1930s. As the market grew beyond that of traditional investment banking institutions, new investors again called for increased transparency, leading to the passage of new, mandatory disclosure laws for issuers, and the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission. In 1936 a new set of laws were introduced, prohibiting banks from investing in "speculative investment securities" as determined by "recognized rating manuals". Banks were permitted only to hold "investment grade" bonds, following the judgment of Moody's, along with Standard, Poor's and Fitch. In the decades that followed, state insurance regulators approved similar requirements.In 1962, Moody's Investors Service was bought by Dun & Bradstreet, a firm engaged in the related field of credit reporting, although they continued to operate largely as independent companies.
1970s to 2000
In the late 1960s and 1970s, commercial paper and bank deposits began to be rated. As well, the major agencies began charging the issuers of bonds as well as investors — Moody's began doing this in 1970 — thanks in part to a growing free rider problem related to the increasing availability of inexpensive photocopy machines, and the increased complexity of the financial markets. Rating agencies also grew in size as the number of issuers grew, both in the United States and abroad, making the credit rating business significantly more profitable. In 2005 Moody's estimated that 90% of credit rating agency revenues came from issuer fees.The end of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 led to the liberalization of financial regulations, and the global expansion of capital markets in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1975, the SEC changed its minimum capital requirements for broker-dealers, using bond ratings as a measurement. Moody's and nine other agencies were identified by the SEC as "nationally recognized statistical ratings organizations" for broker-dealers to use in meeting these requirements.
The 1980s and beyond saw the global capital market expand; Moody's opened its first overseas offices in Japan in 1985, followed by offices in the United Kingdom in 1986, France in 1988, Germany in 1991, Hong Kong in 1994, India in 1998 and China in 2001. The number of bonds rated by Moody's and the Big Three agencies grew substantially as well. As of 1997, Moody's was rating about $5 trillion in securities from 20,000 U.S. and 1,200 non-U.S. issuers. The 1990s and 2000s were also a time of increased scrutiny, as Moody's was sued by unhappy issuers and investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as criticism following the Enron scandal, the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis, and the 2008 financial crisis.
In 1998, Dun & Bradstreet sold the Moody's publishing business to Financial Communications. Following several years of rumors and pressure from institutional shareholders, in December 1999 Moody's parent Dun & Bradstreet announced it would spin off Moody's Investors Service into a separate publicly traded company. Although Moody's had fewer than 1,500 employees in its division, it represented about 51% of Dun & Bradstreet profits in the year before the announcement. The spin-off was completed on September 30, 2000, and, in the half decade that followed, the value of Moody's shares improved by more than 300%.