| Agnes de Petigny | ||||||
It is a rare investor who is willing to be seen openly criticizing the job that rating agencies do. Despite fund managers' private grumbles - about the shortcomings, the mistakes, the frustrations - the relationship is still too important to jeopardize. Behind closed doors, however, it is a different story.
"Rating agencies have no predictive capabilities whatsoever," says one European high-yield portfolio manager - asking, in exasperation: "Why do people still tolerate them? Why do they use them?"
At the other end of the scale, an investor who professes to value rating agencies can manage no bigger compliment than this when asked about how forward thinking they are: "They can be quite slow, but for the big credits they're generally not too far behind."
A decade ago there were fewer than 50 companies in Europe with ratings.