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In July 2008 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) published three proposals relating to the use of credit ratings in its rules and forms. The proposals were designed to address concerns that the misuse of credit ratings may have contributed to the current crisis. The SEC sought market feedback regarding the effect the removal of credit rating references may produce on the markets.

This article examines the use of ratings by various market constituents, analyzes the details of the SEC proposals, and reviews the provided feedback. The main finding is that the majority of the market participants opposed the SEC proposals. Fiduciaries and regulated entities are looking to regulators to offer a common measure of risk, stable, accurate and free of conflict of interests.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the emerging Chinese credit rating agencies (CRAs), and their development, regulatory regime and challenges. The Chinese financial system has made many improvements; in particular, the regulatory regime has reached a more effective level. However, it should be admitted that some aspects still require further development. Compared with other developed markets, the Chinese credit rating industry is still young. Under these circumstances, questions are raised about the performance of the CRAs in China. Whether the legal framework is effective enough? A further point, in terms of the development, is what are the major obstacles lying ahead for the Chinese CRAs?

This paper will concentrate on the study of Chinese CRAs. Starting with a brief introduction and analysis on the Chinese CRAs, it will further examine the rating methodologies of the Chinese CRAs. Following this, the regulatory regimes will be analyzed in detail, from the perspectives of the securities, banking and insurance market. Moreover, the paper will identify the key problems under the current regulatory regime. Last but not least, a conclusion and some future suggestions for the development of the regulatory regime will also be made based on the earlier observations and study.

The current development stage and future reform requirement of the Chinese credit rating industry.

Provide a full dimension and in depth analysis on the Chinese credit rating industry.

The chapter presents an analysis of the decision-making process of leaders on issues of nuclear armament and nuclear disarmament, through four case studies. The first, pertaining armament, is South Africa, with a focus on Pieter Willem Botha, former prime minister and president of South Africa. The second deals with former Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi’s nuclear armament decision. The third case study investigates the decision of former president of South Africa, F. W. De Klerk, on nuclear disarmament. The fourth and final case study uncovers Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s nuclear disarmament decision.

Using the Applied Decision Analysis (ADA) method historical decisions have been analyzed in this chapter for the purpose of identifying each leader’s ‘decision code’. Specifically, were these decisions based on rational calculations or were they influenced more by cognitive decision processes?

By revealing a ‘decision code’ using a reverse engineering of the decision processes, I conclude that the three leaders placed high importance on security and geopolitics. By analyzing different dimensions and processes that impacted their decision processes, it is evident that while armament decision utilizes the poliheuristic decision rule, disarmament decisions abide by rational calculations.

This chapter examines the central role played by credit rating agencies in the production of “knowledge” about financial instruments. That “knowledge,” in the form of credit ratings, underpinned disintermediation in mortgage markets by giving investors confidence that they knew the risk-and-return properties of otherwise opaque collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and mortgage-backed securities. Credit ratings helped to “standardize” structured financial products and create liquid markets. However, this cognitive machinery failed and liquidity collapsed during the current crisis. I use this failure to examine the role of institutionalized cognition in the production of market liquidity.

This study aims to analyze the determinants of ratings of corporate bonds and sukuk issued by firms listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX) for the 2013–2019 period.

This study uses a quantitative approach by testing hypotheses and using logistic regression. Ordinal logistic endogenous (or dependent) variables (Y) in ordinal logistics use data in the form of levels (ordinal scale). Independent (or exogenous) variables (X), include financial and non-financial factors for dependent (or endogenous) variables (Y), namely, of corporate bonds and sukuk ratings. There are two approaches to the study they are Logit and Gompit (Negative Log-Log. The population of the study is Indonesian companies listed on the IDX that issued bonds and sukuk for the 2013–2019 periods. The sampling technique is purposive. In total, 16 corporate companies adhering to the above criteria and issuing bonds and sukuk were chosen. In total, 270 types of bonds and 280 types of sukuk were selected as samples.

The results of the Logit and Gompit regression show that leverage ratio, firm size, security structure and maturity date are important determinants of corporate bond ratings while profitability and liquidity ratios appear to have no influence on the rating. In the case of sukuk, profitability, liquidity and maturity date play important roles in influencing the corporate sukuk rating. However, there is no evidence to suggest that leverage ratio, company size and security structure may affect sukuk ratings.

For both sukuk and bond issuers, it is necessary to pay attention to the factors that may affect the ratings. Specifically, Sukuk issuers need to pay attention to the return of asset, current ratio, growth and structure. On the other hand, bond issuers need to consider depth to equity, structure and maturity. As for investors, the findings of this study reveal that both bond and sukuk ratings reflect their performance.

This study provides useful information for investors that allows them to assess the risk of sukuk or bonds chosen based on rating and financial performance.

The novelty of this study lies in its econometric methodology used to identify factors which influence sukuk and bond ratings. Specifically, this study used two different techniques that allow a robust conclusion to be drawn. Furthermore, this study provides a systematic analysis which allows comparison between factors which affect bond and sukuk ratings in Indonesia.

In response to the financial crisis that began in 2007, United States President Barack Obama signed H.R. 4173, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, into law on July 21, 2010. “Dodd-Frank” is intended to correct certain problems in financial markets by federally regulating the activities of independent municipal financial advisors and comprehensively expanding regulatory oversight over credit rating agencies. This article reviews the legislation and its financial management rationale, and discusses its actual and potential impact on the future operations of the municipal securities market and its participants.

With the help of financial engineering – and equipped with the modern technique of risk management – securitisation was supposed to identify and evaluate risks and parcel them out to informed parties who could bear them. In hindsight, we can see that this somewhat simplistic thesis – espoused by market participants as well as the academic promoters of modern techniques of risk management – seemed to promise a great deal more than it could ultimately deliver. At this juncture, however, the danger of regulatory over-reaction – which might be throwing the baby (financial innovation) out with the bath-water (overlooking/under-pricing of risk) – is very real and (in my view) calls for policy measures of this sort should be resisted firmly not only by market participants but also by regulators. This is not to say that regulation should be seen as immune from responsibility in the unfolding of the current credit crisis (quite the opposite would more likely be closer to the truth). As we shall see below (Section “Financial Crisis and Credit Ratings Debacle in SF”), the best risk-management practices – and related tools available before the crisis – provided enough ammunition to caution against the uncertainty surrounding risk assessment for some categories of SF products. However, the increasing complexity embedded in an increasing number of deals did provide genuine new challenges even to best risk-management practices.

The purpose of this postmortem is to assess whether the design, implementation, and maintenance of financial policies during the period from 1996 through 2006 were primary causes of the financial system's demise.

To draw conclusions about the policy determinants of the crisis, the paper studies five important policies: Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) policies toward credit rating agencies, Federal Reserve policies concerning bank capital and credit default swaps, SEC and Federal Reserve policies about over‐the‐counter derivatives, SEC policies toward the consolidated supervision of major investment banks, and government policies toward two housing‐finance entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The evidence is inconsistent with the view that the collapse of the financial system was caused only by the popping of the housing bubble (“accident”) and the herding behavior of financiers rushing to create and market increasingly complex and questionable financial products (“suicide”). Rather, the evidence indicates that senior policymakers repeatedly designed, implemented, and maintained policies that destabilized the global financial system in the decade before the crisis. Moreover, although the major regulatory agencies were aware of the growing fragility of the financial system due to their policies, they chose not to modify those policies, suggesting that “negligent homicide” contributed to the financial system's collapse.

Although influential policymakers presume that international capital flows, euphoric traders, and insufficient regulatory power caused the crisis, this paper shows that these factors played only a partial role. Thus, current reforms represent only a partial and thus incomplete step in establishing a stable and well‐functioning financial system. Since systemic institutional failures helped cause the crisis, systemic institutional reforms must be a part of a comprehensively effective response.

As cyber-attacks continue to grow, organisations adopting the internet-of-things (IoT) have continued to react to security concerns that threaten their businesses within the current highly competitive environment. Many recorded industrial cyber-attacks have successfully beaten technical security solutions by exploiting human-factor vulnerabilities related to security knowledge and skills and manipulating human elements into inadvertently conveying access to critical industrial assets. Knowledge and skill capabilities contribute to human analytical proficiencies for enhanced cybersecurity readiness. Thus, a human-factored security endeavour is required to investigate the capabilities of the human constituents (workforce) to appropriately recognise and respond to cyber intrusion events within the industrial control system (ICS) environment.

A quantitative approach (statistical analysis) is adopted to provide an approach to quantify the potential cybersecurity capability aptitudes of industrial human actors, identify the least security-capable workforce in the operational domain with the greatest susceptibility likelihood to cyber-attacks (i.e. weakest link) and guide the enhancement of security assurance. To support these objectives, a Human-factored Cyber Security Capability Evaluation approach is presented using conceptual analysis techniques.

Using a test scenario, the approach demonstrates the capacity to proffer an efficient evaluation of workforce security knowledge and skills capabilities and the identification of weakest link in the workforce.

The approach can enable organisations to gain better workforce security perspectives like security-consciousness, alertness and response aptitudes, thus guiding organisations into adopting strategic means of appropriating security remediation outlines, scopes and resources without undue wastes or redundancies.

This paper demonstrates originality by providing a framework and computational approach for characterising and quantify human-factor security capabilities based on security knowledge and security skills. It also supports the identification of potential security weakest links amongst an evaluated industrial workforce (human agents), some key security susceptibility areas and relevant control interventions. The model and validation results demonstrate the application of action research. This paper demonstrates originality by illustrating how action research can be applied within socio-technical dimensions to solve recurrent and dynamic problems related to industrial environment cyber security improvement. It provides value by demonstrating how theoretical security knowledge (awareness) and practical security skills can help resolve cyber security response and control uncertainties within industrial organisations.

The purpose of the article is to explain the significance of key features of the SEC’s new rules for credit rating agencies. Those rules include three key items: they prohibit the influence of sales or marketing considerations on criteria development; they include guidance that preserves the ability of ratings to serve as relative rather than absolute measures of credit risk; and they require cross-sector consistency of rating symbols. When they were released the significance of the rules was under-appreciated because of other simultaneous regulatory announcements.

The approach is to consider how effectively the rules address their target issues. In doing so the article explores how the final rules evolved from their original proposed form and from the statutory specifications in the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act.

The new rules should promote the integrity of credit ratings in the future. They should be effective in reducing the influence of sales and marketing considerations on the development of rating criteria. In addition they should enhance rating integrity through superior cross-sector consistency in the meanings of rating symbols while allowing rating agencies to maintain their traditional emphasis on relative risk.

The authors are not aware of any similar work assessing the selected provisions of the new SEC rules for credit rating agencies.