Quote Originally Posted by OUTLAW 09 View Post
Russians are arguing that they need now their own rating agency but that is 10 years away and with Russian criminal activity no one would trust the agency so they are tied to the three US rating agencies forever so to speak.
Hardly.
The U.S. rating agencies have no competence in their core business to speak of - they merely have market shares and reputation.

Plenty smaller rating agencies exist which could easily jump start subsidiaries or joint ventures.

Besides, rating agencies are so very useless, nobody "needs" them - other than for rackets. It's about time we establish test runs to expose how useless the financial sector's judgement on risks is. I've seen it myself many times; flipping coins would be quicker, cheaper and in no way inferior to bankers deciding on business loan requests.