Raymond McDaniel Jr. isn’t riled easily. As CEO of ratings agency Moody’s Corp. during the financial crisis, he came under spirited attack from regulators, politicians and the general public for giving triple-A ratings to the securities that led to the U.S. mortgage-market meltdown. During three separate congressional hearings, a contrite but confident McDaniel admitted that his firm had underestimated the severity of the credit problem. He defended the integrity of its ratings as well as detailed the lessons it had learned to improve both its own operations and, more generally, the U.S. mortgage origination and securitization process.
“Moody’s has gone through as much legal and regulatory scrutiny as any business and in many ways has emerged as a stronger business,” says Alex Baring, a partner and analyst at hedge fund firm The Children’s Investment Fund (U.K.), which owns more than 5 percent of the company. “A lot of the credit for that goes to Ray. He’s a clever man with an even temperament and the combination has been important for a CEO of a leading rating agency in the years through and since the financial crisis.”
穆迪成立于1909年，是世界上最古老，最大的独立提供商的信用评级意见。根据穆迪的投资者服务（MIS）名称，该评级业务占穆迪公司的69％，去年收入的29.7亿美元。穆迪的分析（MA）产生了其他31％。MA业务由信用研究，数据和分析服务以及风险管理和测量软件构建;超过一半的收入来自MIS信用分析师创建的研究。TCI的野蛮人喜欢穆迪商业模式的多样化，他说应该能够在可预见的未来将年度收入增长10％至15％。（它的平均年增长率是过去27年的13％。）
McDaniel probably wouldn’t be CEO of Moody’s if it hadn’t been for the Tax Reform Act of 1986, one of the last truly bipartisan pieces of Washington legislation. The 56-year-old Emory University School of Law graduate spent the first four years of his career involved in surety bonding for tax-advantaged investments at National Union Fire Insurance Co., a unit of American International Group. The landmark 1986 bill made his group irrelevant by lowering the overall tax rate and eliminating loopholes. A year later McDaniel joined Moody’s as an analyst in its securitization area. He transferred to London in the ’90s, eventually managing the company’s European business, and returned to New York in 1996 to oversee its entire international business, the role he held when Moody’s was spun out of Dun & Bradstreet as a public company in September 2000. McDaniel was elevated to his current position in April 2005 following the retirement of former CEO John Rutherfurd Jr.
亚博赞助欧冠编辑Michael Peltz于9月初在穆迪在穆迪的世界总部在曼哈顿下的穆迪举行会见了麦迪尔，六年后六年后讨论了他公司的战略。
亚博赞助欧冠机构投资者：危机的程度何时变得清晰？
Ray McDaniel：在2006年末期，我们开始在美国住房市场的一些柔软性和对抵押贷款支持证券的影响。它真的在2007年，问题的潜在规模变得更加明显。然后在2008年，随着雷曼和AIG的问题，整体情况再次下降。所以有一系列阶段，问题的范围和深度变得更加清晰。
穆迪做了什么来解决市场上发生的事情？
好吧，研究评论和评级行动，当然。然后，在住房市场的问题完全实现后，我们看着我们在学到的经验教训方面需要做的事情。There was for many people — and I don’t think we were exempted from this — a sense of comfort in these mortgage-backed securities, that the geographic dispersion of the assets, the zip codes that were in these pools of mortgages, was going to be very protective of the overall portfolios. There had been so many decades of performance in the housing market where we had not seen a nationwide downturn in housing — certainly nothing as dramatic as what came about in 2008 — so that even if there were isolated problems in one part of the country or one part of a state, they were not likely to spread throughout a portfolio of geographically diverse assets. And at the end of the day, it proved to be a poor assumption for what happened.
In 2010 you testified alongside Warren Buffett, Moody’s largest shareholder, before Congress’s Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. That must have been interesting.
我可以想到许多情况，我可以享受坐在沃伦巴菲特，但这不会是我的第一选择。但它是政策反应和探究过程的过程的一部分 - 再次，从金融危机中吸取的教训是什么。
Buffett really defended Moody’s.
我认为他很坦诚的表达自己的观点of view, that many, many people did not predict what was going to happen and, again, the breadth and depth. I know Moody’s — and I’m sure most everyone else who didn’t predict the extent of the financial crisis — would prefer to have been more accurate in their views and their assumptions. And I think that came out in the testimony.
什么是最大的经验教训？
从信用分析角度来看，我认为我们一直在提高我们的标准，我们的标准，以获得我们所捐赠的最高评级。但事实证明，在核算实际发生的事情方面，我们所做的变化是一项重要的措施。正如我所提到的那样，这是我们正在寻找数据回归数十年的事实，这鼓励了与模型的舒适感以及资产，证券如何在压力下进行，并且真正没有容纳经济衰退的程度和步伐。
So a big lesson learned was to incorporate what is now real-world information into our modeling — and to also incorporate a more top-downmacroeconomic视图的,在这种情况下,正在发生的事情with housing policy in the United States — what’s happening with the housing market, what’s happening with developments in mortgage products and how do those impact the credit risk of these instruments.
Did the crisis change your business strategy?
从业务战略的角度来看，我们一直试图提供我们可以的最高质量评级。我们是以信誉为主的业务 - 为独立性的准确性声誉 - 这就是为什么由于我们在房地产市场中看到的问题以及大量评级而言的含义对业务有害。我们非常优先考虑了我们所拥有的研究和评级的质量，预测内容和洞察力。因此，从那时起业务战略没有改变，因为这总是一个优先事项。但这也是为什么它如此损害，因为我们真的处于以信誉为主的业务。
自危机以来，穆迪对其业务信贷方面的依赖者依赖吗？
Moody’s Analytics was created as a separate operating company in 2007. We had made that decision six to nine months ahead of the actual move, so although it was coincident in time with some of the biggest stress in the financial market, the decision had been made before that was evident.
Moody’s Investors Service, the rating agency, was left to do ratings and research, with all of our other data, risk measurement, risk management and professional services work being done in this sister operating company, Moody’s Analytics. We have grown the Moody’s Analytics business since then. It’s about 30 percent of our revenue today. And it is a diversification of our business, away from purely credit ratings and research. In addition to that, we’ve expanded internationally over the last half dozen years. And so the growth of Moody’s Analytics and the growth of Moody’s international business, both on the ratings side and on the analytics side, has diversified our business.
您认为最不理解的是穆迪的最不理解的一部分？
传统上，我会说，穆迪的分析是我们业务的一部分不太了解。当许多股东或潜在股东正在考虑穆迪时，他们正在考虑信用评级机构。这就是他们与穆迪的品牌联系起来的;这是他们最熟悉的。穆迪的分析销售了穆迪投资者服务分析师的研究，但它还销售了自己的研究和数据和经济分析。重要的是，它有一个软件商业销售销售平台，以满足加强风险管理和风险计量的监管需求。金融危机的后果显然是提高风险管理的优先级。
金融危机后的规则增加了很讽刺，适合你吗？
Like probably most every other firm in the world, we would have preferred not to have gone through the financial crisis. But there are lessons that are learned; there are reactions that can be helpful to the marketplace. And that’s what we’re trying to do: react in a way that helps become a part of the next solution.
您在哪里看到最良好的增长？
几个地区。一个是债券市场的增长，来自银行系统的金融资产的Dimintediation，并进入债券市场。二是国际增长，这真的是国内和区域债券市场的发展。因此，我们看到的嫌疑人是近来的补充，我们看到了很多看起来都是一样的。
A lot of what’s happening in the financial institution sector — capital adequacy, directives, stress-testing demands, the need for financial institutions to curtail some of the business activities they might have been in previously and the pressure that puts on profitability, the deleveraging that is occurring in the financial system — is really driving a lot of change. And we’re trying to position ourselves again to be a constructive service provider in those areas of change.
As you’re doing more internationally, especially in emerging markets, do you need analysts with different skill sets to be able to analyze things like political risk?
是的。我们的政治风险从我们主权团队的分析开始。但随后我们在各种学科的分析团队必须将政治风险纳入他们的分析，不同程度。但在某种程度上存在可能影响公司或行业产生足够现金流量以履行其义务的政治风险，我们必须考虑到。因此，它确实成为信用过程的一部分。
利率怎么样？我们处于异常较低的水平。
我们处于低位。我预料到这次率将会更高，但是，如许多人，我在估计速度开始上升时的早产。当他们开始向上移动时，我们经常从上升率环境中获得对我们业务的影响的问题。我的答案是，这取决于。If we have rates rising because there’s economic momentum, and the economic momentum is breeding business confidence, mergers and acquisition activity, capital expenditure, maybe more share repurchases by companies, things of that sort, then I think we have a good set of conditions for our business going forward. We wouldn’t see the opportunistic refinancing that we’ve seen in recent years in a rising-rate environment, but we will see other reasons for borrowing that have been dampened in recent years because of a lack of strong global growth and associated business confidence.
如果我们看到在某种滞留场景下的速度下升，我认为这对我们的业务有害。我们不会看到很多业务信心在那种场景中，有关投资和扩展会更加谨慎。我们不会有机会的再融资进行。因此，我们将失去许多潜在的气瓶，以便至少在周期性的基础上驾驶业务。
您是否与Berkshire Hathaway或Buffett有很多互动？
不，我们根本没有与Berkshire Hathaway互动。事实上，我多年来没有与巴菲特先生说过。
那是一个好迹象吗？
我认为是这样。当然，如果他有疑虑，他就不会犹豫不决。但他是穆迪的长期股东，显然我们对此非常高兴。
阅读更多信息corporationsandregulation。
在Twitter上关注Mike Peltz@mppeltz.。