Back then, the ratings agencies were in trouble, because they had made a lot of bad calls. It seemed that whenever an institution was going under, the guys at the credit rating agencies were the last to know about it. Back then, they sold their assessments of credit risk to subscribers. So no one wanted to subscribe.
So in the seventies, the regulators stepped in to make people use the credit rating services. In 1975 the SEC created the Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organization (NRSRO) designation. Credit rating agencies so designated received what was in effect a grant of governmental power. The SEC then relied on the NRSRO’s credit risk assessment in establishing capital requirements on SEC-regulated financial institutions – which meant that for SEC-regulated financial institutions to borrow and lend, they had to get rated. A cascade of regulatory decisions followed over the years, each decision forcing more and more reliance on the risk assessments issued by these demonstrably incompetent institutions – and less and less reliance on other people’s risk assessment. For more and more organizations, it became illegal for them to make their own judgments about risk.
By the 1990s, as Levine and Partnoy tell us, the NRSROs were not selling assessments of credit risks, but licenses to issue securities. The rating agencies did not genuinely assess risk, nor did anyone really expect them to. Nor could repeatedly demonstrated incompetence reduce demand for their services, so the ratings agencies had no incentive to provide correct credit ratings. Since their income was entirely dependent on the state granting them power, they did, however, have an incentive to make politically correct credit ratings. If you lend to the poor, the oppressed, etc, and you are run by good old boys from Yale and Harvard, and you make donations to the right politicians, the NRSROs have a very powerful incentive to give you a good credit rating. And if you have a good credit rating, you can borrow as much as you like – and if you go bust, the government will bail you out.