ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes to examine the justification effort to analyse institutional legitimacy within the credit rating industry. It presents a number of comments sent to the SEC within the context of public consultations on credit rating. It is intriguing that, despite the worst financial crisis since the 1930s and the identification of a suitable culprit in the rating agencies, proposed regulation should be so unsubstantial, doing so little to alter the rating system that has been implemented in the US since 1909 and in Europe since the mid-1980s. Criticism has been directed towards credit ratings on several occasions in the past, at any time agencies have been recorded as neglecting their mission to assign a rating determining the creditworthiness of an issuer or a debt issuance. With the qualification process in compliance with the test format, the field of credit rating initially illustrates the work of maintenance resulting from the characteristics of a standard compromise.
