Top Credit Reporting Agencies

Ms sued late banking and credit bureau, which pronounced her death, says that she was not able to re-finance the loan or get a new credit line.

She sues her own bench and a large credit agency - after almost a year of trying to show them that she is actually still living. St. Louis based Kimberly Haman, a St. Louis-based securities regulator, brought a state suit alleging the two companies' reluctance to solve the issue by blocking them from funding their mortgages or obtaining a new credit cards.

It has twice been balked from funding her mortgages at a lower interest and a credit was declined after possible lenders defiled her "deceased" statute, the process said. A " retailer of credit information " informed its future mortgagor Haman on 29 March that its request for funding had been shelved.

Your creditor resisted again at the end of June and said she was still presented as having died. And Haman phoned Heartland again. Equifax then phoned her and an associate reassured her that the issue would be solved, says the wetsuit. In August, she was refused a credit for being reported missing. She refused to further debate Haman's case except to say that he "lights up the world" about shortcomings in the processes used by credit bureaus like Equifax to examine controversial client information.

Haman's Haman's local attorney, Robert Healey, said that her two Mum and Dad were "alive and well" and that nothing had ever occurred that would not cause anyone to declare her dead. The whole process has placed [Haman] under considerable mistrust, disappointment and harassment and has left the applicant desperate as to her capacity to recover her reputation and the creditworthiness she deserved and for which she has worked well.

Gazette 115 of the GaWC Research Bulletin

Credit Ratings are one of the most important issues for the global economic growth and operation in the era of globalisation. Obviously, the credit assessment system can be seen as an information element and column of the cash flow infrastructures. I would exaggerate to say that the credit-rating industry and globalisation always evolve in close parallel, but their reciprocal impact is evident.

"Henry Varnum Poor's right to knowledge": these words have become a corporate valuation slogan that has become an integral part of the ever-growing networking landscape. From the early 1990s, innovative work by Anthony D. King (1991) and in particular by Saskia Sassen (1991, 1994) has drawn researchers' interest to the intercity worldwide networking, in which progressive manufacturing service plays an important part.

In the following phases, the Globalization and Worldsities ("GaWC") Study Group at Loughborough University began measuring intercity connections. GaWC first compiled a multi-level directory of cosmopolitan towns and launched matrices (e.g. Beaverstock, Smith and Taylor 1999; Taylor 2001a; Taylor, Walker and Beaverstock 2002). Of these, 123 have a connection of 0.2 to 1.0, which is at least one fifth of the most closely related London town.

Different distances (from 123 to 316 cities) allowed the use of some general aggregation statistics (e.g. Taylor, Catalano and Walker 2003b; Derudder, Taylor, Witlox and Catalano 2003b) and concentrated on several areas (e.g. Taylor 2001b; Brown, Catalano and Taylor 2002b). Thus many important facets of globalisation are illustrated by surveys conducted by GACC.

On the other hand, there are many remarkable studies on indebtedness and ratings businesses. First, it should be noted that the importance of the credit ratings sector for the orderly evolution of the modern economies is emphasised by overseas meetings dealing with the industry's issues.

Of these, the most prestigious and specialised were the International Conference on Credit Reporting Systems (Miami, 22-24 June 2000) and The Role of Credit Reporting Systems in the International Economy (Washington DC, 1-2 March 2001), backed by the World Bank Group, the University of Maryland Center for International Economics, the New York University Stern School of Business and other major agencies.

Thus, for example, we can particularly differentiate "A Historical Primer on the Business of Credit Rating" from Richard Sylla (2001), "Rating Agencies": Was there an Agency Issue" by Roy C. Smith and Ingo Walter (2001), "The Credit Rating Industry: The second part looks at evaluated towns rather than companies.

Not only is such a credit assessment intimately linked to the supply of trans-national debt, it could also be an important sign of more FDI-initiative. A further fundamental kind of information is the evaluation levels in symbolic forms such as AAA, A+, Baa1, etc.. We used open information available on the agencies' web sites for the computations in the two main parts of this work.

Looking briefly at the story of credit rating will be very useful in this investigation. There are two major bases for the evolution of ratings: the first is the ripeness of the diverse debt markets and the second is the existence of multilateral global financial markets streams.

History shows that the first corporate ventures in Europe were mainly funded by credit and the largest activities in the colonies. In addition, most of the lending came from government borrowing, and this type of issuer had no reason to devise a system of credit rating.

With the launch of the first privately owned multinational rail venture - the US Railways - the picture has completely shifted. In the words of R. Sylla,'The corporates bonds markets, in its early decade basically a railway bonds markets, can be seen as an US finance innovator that later expanded to the rest of the world' (Sylla 2001).

Further developments in the credit ratings sector were characterised by the emergence of credit reporting agencies (such as R.G. Dun and Company) and the specialised economic and finance media on the solvency of businesses (e.g. Henry Poor's Manual of the Rails of the United States). In 1909 John Moody established the first real credit ratings company, starting his railway bond ratings.

The Poor Company transferred its operations to bondrating in 1916 and Standard & Poor's AG (S&P) was founded in 1941 after the merge with Standard Statistics. It' s interesting that these agencies have been at the heart of the global ratings sector since that early period and are still at the heart of it. In the meantime, the stock of CRAs' sensitive portfolio of financing vehicles has improved significantly.

In addition to issuance, such as various types of corporate bonds, it now comprises government and local authority bond rating and above all corporate, state and city prices, which are considered as integral units. Since 1998, Moody's has been publishing its credit rating, which assesses the credit standing of a business even if it has no government debts owed to it.

Those valuations of issuers represent Moody's views on a company's capacity to satisfy its primary financing covenants. Up to twelve psychologists were even hired by the big agencies. A new turn for the credit ratings sector took place in the 1970s, when the globalisation of credit flows ushered in a new phase of its evolution. A number of scholars believe that there is a similarity between the 1970s and the second trimester of the 19th centuries, the era of the first ever worldwide move of venture capitals.

Moody's Investors Service, Standard & Poor's Rating Services and Fitch Inc. were the first agencies to be commissioned. No other agencies, either domestically or abroad, have obtained SEC approval since then, until recently. Only in February 2003 did the SEC grant NRSRO protection to the Toronto-based Dominion Bond Rating Agency, thereby extending the scope of the rating again.

In some other jurisdictions, there is a larger number of credit assessment agencies whose ratings are recognised for supervisory use. The UK, for example, formally recognises ten agencies, the Netherlands and France - nine - while the Luxembourg and Swedish agencies only recognise three. Astonishingly, Germany does not use ratings information in its finance regulations.

This can be seen as further evidence of the credit ratings agencies' unrivalled positioning in the markets, which shows how much their profits are related to their well-deserved reputations. It can be said that the US has the longest record of running ratings information on the orders of state regulators. The expansion of credit quality product coverage resulted in a regulation adopted in 1999 which allows any US banking institution to open its finance affiliate only if it meets certain credit quality requirements.

Currently, there are nearly 150 credit ratings agencies worldwide, and industry experts predict that this number will increase further, especially in less mature economies, while the number of agencies worldwide will decline further. Therefore, a differentiation must be made between agencies that are nationally, locally and internationally active. Capital Intelligence, for example, concentrates on Central/Eastern Europe, and most of Sweden's credit counselors are worried about their local businesses.

Concerning the worldwide trading organisation for the credit ratings sector, there are no such bodies other than the ASEAN Forum of Credit Ratings Agencies (AFCRA), which was established in 1995 by credit ratings agencies from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand. Credit ratings agencies have an immense impact on the foreign markets.

"In my view, there are two great powers in the whole earth today. There is the United States and the Moody's Bond Rating Service. Although somewhat overvalued, this assertion clearly mirrors the present creditworthiness status in today's economies. However, we are sure that the credit agencies will be able to make our time of economical disequilibria and shock more "creditworthy" and calculable in case of illness or good.

Obviously, we need to clear their own networking system for the operational information of credit ratings agencies. The " Big Three " of the world' credit ratings agencies were chosen for this explorative research. It is this set of bureaus of the most important advisors that forms an important infrastructural framework for the smooth operation of the world' s credit ratings services.

However, some important characteristics of this deal have changed the way in which the GRA's corporate banking ecosystem operates, as opposed to the corporate ecosystem of other industries. For this reason, when analysing the architecture of the credit ratings agency ecosystem, we found it useful to examine the relationship between the levels of GACC overall interconnectivity and the existence of bureaux of global assessors.

We will be provided with both quantative and quantative measurements of the assessment framework and will be provided with verifiable evidence of the relationship between the levels of interconnectivity of global metropolitan areas and the visibility of international ratings agencies. Findings from the investigation will be combined into a new dataset that will allow us to give an appropriate reasoning for the description of the credit ratings agencies' universes.

There are only 85 office buildings for 48 towns in reality. Thus, the relationship between towns that have bureaus of foreign credit agencies and those that do not, is even smaller than the relationship of assessed / unrated relationship, which is further examined. Dispersed datasets on separate layers of gaWC interconnectivity show some further results.

Even though the densities of the evaluators' offices are likely to be lower than in other mature services industries, both overall models are quite similar. Looking at the worldwide chart of the ratings businesses, the most networked towns particularly affirm their excellent standing; such a position also underlines the credibility of the GaWC figures to date.

In order to visualize these dates we use the cluster card pattern "Global Connectivity of the Major Nodes in the World City Network" (Taylor, Catalano and Walker 2002a: Fig. 2). The following comparison is made on the basis of ratings by three leading agencies: Of these 123 towns, only 29 are directly assessed as emitters by at least one of three agencies.

Towns with a certain administration statute can form the most apparent complement. In fact, Distrito Federal can be seen as a byword for Mexico City in the field of Mexico sub-government loans; the city of Hong Kong could hardly be isolated from the Hong Kong Special Administration Region, etc. For the US (where public sector liabilities are sophisticated and often diverse for particular purposes), the strongest analogies with issuer credit assessments are for debt securities with general liabilities.

In this way we can rightly increase the number of towns by 23. A number of other issues can be resolved through sub-sovereign areas that are also classified as emitters. In the case of Australia, for example, where only states and capital territory, but not towns, are valued, it is quite simple. Stuttgart is without a doubt the premier German location for Baden-Württemberg in terms of politics, economy and finance (the largest local rivals, i.e. Mannheim, Heidelberg and Karlsruhe, are far behind the top 123 in the world).

However, it is not possible to use the creditworthiness of North Rhine-Westphalia for Cologne or Düsseldorf ( both towns are among the top 123). Therefore, they are deemed not to be valued. Lastly, in 10 unique cases, we find the possibility of using government bonds: Certainly, these towns monitor domestic cash flow and are by far leaders in the sustainability of public finances and credit assessments.

Even though these towns are not directly valued, this could in hypothetical terms be associated with such strange ratios, but not only with isolating them from the global ratings world. Nevertheless, in some cases we have dealt specifically with the statistic contributions of such towns. However, even such reservations do not allow Israel's sovereign ratings to be used for Tel Aviv (which is partially offset by Jerusalem (its own connectivity is 0. 045; No. 283) and Haifa), Cyprus's Nicosia ratings (the second highest associated town is Limassol: 0. 133, No. 190).

According to all these projections and filterings we can see 79 towns being evaluated directly or indirectly according to the number of towns (i.e. 64. 23 per cent of the general number, 123). The following is a list of the main criteria for the assessment of the quality of a city: (i) basic monotony of assessed / unrated towns and (ii) the quality of the assessments made by the agencies. The most important information for this report is the long-term issuer creditworthiness in both local and international currencies.

These fundamental scale levels of agencies could be generalised for statistic and analytic use. We use an arithmetic mean when a town is scaled by one or more agencies in tandem. In the following, two kinds of information are used and explained above: horizontal (for geographic megaregions) and vertical (for layers of the most contiguous cities).

Hypothetically, we have followed some earlier GWC trials (Taylor b 2001; Taylor, Catalano and Gane 2002) with only minor variations in the delineation of geographical borders due to variations in the materials themselves. In North America, the Bermuda Islands included (28 towns with a zero connection to the world). While we study the simplest information couples (rated / unrated), the highest possible number of points for each town is 3 (if such a town is evaluated by all three main authorities); obviously they are theoretic region maxima:

Total aggregate value is 369. We get 83 even without considering Bermuda government bonds (which could be used for Hamilton). Canada's many top 123 direct scoring towns include Toronto, Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver. However, it should be noted that most Australasian credit assessments are not exclusively for municipal but also for local emitters.

65% after excluding Luxembourg government bonds). Not even a big player like Sao Paolo has its own rating. The North Africa / Middle East has a value of 30 per cent, but is certainly attributable to government bonds (Lebanon / Beirut, Kuwait / Kuwait City, Bahrain / Manama).

of 08 per cent; the expulsion of state credit assessments (Singapore) reduced them to 15 per cent. Nevertheless, some dynamic growth economies such as China have little connection with the three major agencies' worldwide communities and creditworthiness. Based on the Mauritius Sovereign Credit Assessment (as for Port Louis) we can get 6. Consequently, only two geographies, North America and Australasia, have higher values than the overall 48-th percentile.

It could also be exemplified by first local subscriptions (by number of heavily related cities) to the aggregate overall amount and derivatives subscriptions (by number of city ratings) to the analogue amount. With the help of the values for the passage of parallels and the highest number of points of 24 (Table 2) we can obtain arithmetic averages for towns and territories.

It has a 23 region median value (calculated directly from ratings). 2; its arithmetic mean, as derived for towns, is 23,021. Globally, the mean value is 19. 82 (Figure 4); the overall mean for 79 evaluated towns is 20.153. Probably such broad generalisations do not provide very useful information in Europe (29 evaluated towns that range from Istanbul 9. 75 to Paris and Vienna 24) and North America (28 towns that range from 16. 5 to 24).

Conversely, the value is not indicative of sub-Saharan Africa (calculated for a given city). Analog rating systems in Latin America, especially Argentina, are under powerful pressures from government indebtedness issues. Intercity interconnectivity data derived, analyzed and interpretated in gaWC trials (e.g. Taylor, Catalano and Walker 2002a; Taylor, Catalano and Walker 2002b) allow several different types of VTT.

Connetivity 5. 0 - 1. 0 (17 cities); layer 2. Connetivity 0. 4 - 0. 49 (31 cities); layer 3. Connetivity 0. 3 - 0. 39 (20 cities); layer 4. Connetivity 0. 2 - 0. 29 (55 cities). Let us once again assume that each town that is evaluated by all three agencies receives 3 points for convention; consequently, the maximum theoretic values for strata 1 - 4 are 51, 93, 60 and 165.

There are 7 towns in elite layer 1 which are evaluated by three agencies, 4 towns which are evaluated by two agencies and 4 towns which are evaluated by a sole one. São Paulo and Amsterdam are not evaluated at all. Under its general number (31), 8 towns are evaluated by three agencies, but 11 towns (Dublin, Warsaw, Johannesburg, Mumbai, Beijing, Shanghai, Manila, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta and Taipei) are not evaluated by any of the leading companies.

There are only 7 unrated towns in layer 3. Consequently, we see a fairly high, if not absolutely high, relationship between the level of intercity interconnectivity globally and the participation of municipalities in the trans-national ratings industry (Figure 5). Once again, it should be noted that the overall average is 19.

82 (Figure 4) and the overall mean for 79 evaluated towns was 20.153. Not even the smallest single value (19,333 for New York City) is far from the world' best averages. During the 1990s, the use of the currenyard system allowed for a large peak and low rates of inflation; domestic and sub-national credit assessments were modest at 11-15 (on the same conditioned scale).

Even though the improvement since then has been "almost nothing", it can be presumed that the present extreme low-rated environment is not characteristic of potentially prosperous Argentina and its leaders. Averages 715 (for other 19 cities) in stratum 2. In addition, the relationship between the city' s attractiveness and its creditworthiness can be more accurately quantified by another standardised method, namely the Pearson R method.

Here, each urban centre affects the overall picture on an individual basis and does not resolve into the mean importance for this or that group. In all 79 evaluated towns R1 = 0. 149, which could be seen as a very low but still favourable relation (Figure 7). After removing the most visible and not typical evaluated urban runaway (Buenos Aires), the factor only increases to just p = 0,180.

There are certainly many other sub-national emitters valued by S&P, Moody's or Fitch, but the geographical breakdown of these emitters still varies widely. Only a few of them are to be seen in places 124 - 214 in the extended GaWC rankings (where worldwide networking is below 0.2). Concerning the level of ratings, their dispersion is foreseeably enormous.

Credits such as A, BBB and BB, however, are more frequently found among the vast majority of other borrowers. Again, accurate measures for these towns are outside the scope of this explorative survey, but it could be assumed that the mean credit scores for non-global towns are lower than those for the top 123 as computed in the preceding paragraphs of this document.

This kind of observation makes it possible to see the 123 towns in the spotlight more clearly. There are certain relations between the corporate networking of the best credit agencies, on the one side, and the worldwide networking of the GaWC 100 companies, on the other side.

Various information on evaluated towns and villages (the second section) allows some further summaries. As a company that was originally solely US, the creation of credit assessments has so far been heavily focused in the United States. In addition, the Eastern European states ( Russia and some other members of the Commonwealth of Independent States) are behind the EU as a whole, but their commitment to the credit rating industry is growing fast.

There are many towns and states in Africa, Arabia and Southeast Asia that are either completely or almost completely outside the ratings sector. Studies of the order in which towns and cities rank according to factors of international networking can put some other factors and relationships in perspective. This could be due in part to specific local characteristics (e.g. Africa's towns do not have very high levels of interconnectivity; at the same moment they are more insulated from the ratings industry), but it does not reverse this underlying assumption.

In fact, our "average city" gets 20. Assuming these tentative estimates are correct, we can identify some kinds of intricate relationships between credit ratings information and overall interconnectivity. Certainly, numbers, relationships and inferences could be corrected in a possible expanded survey based on information from many other agencies. But since Standard and Poor's, Moody's and Fitch are undeniably elite champions in this trans-national economy segment, the present computations for these three top-raters (we hope) mirror an integral unit of its own importance.

and Taylor P.J. (2001b) "West Asian/North African Cities in the World City Network: Global Analysis of Dependence, Integration and Autonomy", The Arab World Geographer, 4 (3), 146 - 159. At Taylor P.J., Walker D.R.F., Beaverstock J.V. (2002)'Companies and their Global Service Networks' in Sassen S. (ed) Global Networks, Link-ed Cities, New York - London:

Walker D.R.F. (2002a)'Measurement of the World City Network', Urban Studies, 39, 2367 - 76. for Taylor P.J., Catalano G., Walker D.R.F. (2002b)'Explorative Analyse des World City Network', Urban Studies, 39, 2377 - 94 * Leonid Nikitin, Tscheljabinsk State Pedagogical University, Russland. Code for towns are: