Is Your Bank and Your Insurance Company Financially Healthy?
If you remember back a few years ago, the three large credit rating agencies, S&P, Moody’s, and Fitch, completely missed the 2008-2009 financial crisis. They each gave several companies investment-grade credit ratings just a few months before they went bankrupt. The most famous “rating miss” was a “AAA rating” that one of the agencies’ still had for AIG the day they went belly up and were bailed out by the federal government.
You might wonder how these large, government-approved credit agencies could have missed the housing bubble and the ensuing damage that befell the Wall Street banks and several large insurance companies. In my opinion missing the housing bubble in 2005 was like missing a Boeing 747 crashing into your living room.
I think there were two reasons these credit rating agencies missed what appeared to be obvious signs of looming financial disaster. First, the level of the crisis was unprecedented for anyone born after 1940. Many people on Wall Street were simply in denial that a disaster this big could actually take place in the modern financial world. But the second reason, a very basic conflict of interest, I think was the root of the problem.
The big three credit rating agencies are paid by the financial firms they rate. That is about as big a conflict of interest as I can think of. The conflict was so bad that in some situations, if after a company received a rating they did not like, they could reject the rating and the credit rating agency would not publish it. For years I thought this arrangement was a disaster waiting to happen. It took the credit crisis to shine a light on this problem. If this conflict of interest did not exist, the 2008-2009 credit crisis still would have happened, but people would have had more advance warning of it.
There are other smaller, less well known companies that rate financial firms that do not have a conflict of interest with the firms they rate. These firms publish their ratings based on a subscription basis and thus are not influenced in any way by the financial firms they rate.
One small company provides a free service to individuals who can sign up online to check the financial health of all the institutions they have a financial relationship with. The name of this company is Weiss Research. Weiss provides this free service so they can send you e-mails telling you about other products they sell such as investment newsletters.
Weiss research has received a lot of flack over the years from companies they published low credit ratings. However, after they were proven correct when they predicted months in advance of the 2008 crisis that AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Wachovia, and others were on the verge of bankruptcy, their detractors were silenced.
Weiss Research has set up a separate web site for their free financial institution credit ratings. The web site is www.weisswatchdog.com. Once you register on their site, you type in the banks or insurance companies you do business with in their web site search engine. The site allows you to set up a “watch list” that you can come back and check periodically. If you request it, the site will even send you an e-mail when there is a rating change to one of the firms on your watch list.
I think this service provided by Weiss Research is a valuable service. Every time I need to purchase a new insurance product, I first check their web site to see how they rate the insurance company offering the product. I think you should make a habit of doing the same. As far as I know the big three rating agencies are still paid fees by the firms they rate.
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