What Bloomberg brings to the credit ratings game

    But at the cusp of the credit crisis, the agencies failed to recognize those critical changes in conditions. The credit committees either didn't recognize when market participants were not acting rationally or chose to ignore it. At the height of the bubble, they didn't adequately recognize the impact that inflated prices would have on credit quality.

    And, most importantly, even as the assumptions underlying their models changed and the future became bleak, the agencies didn't make significant changes to their methodologies until after the damage had been done.

    The infamous conflicts of interests also occurred during those qualitative discussions. Issuers were paying for a system that allowed the final rating decision to be made behind closed doors. Emails and transcripts from town hall meetings dredged up by politicians have shown that credit analysts and their higher-ups struggled to issue tough ratings without losing business.

    Had the ratings been purely quantitative and completely transparent, there would have been no struggle between management and analysts to find a happy medium between ratings and revenue.

    There is a case to be made for qualitative analysis, but why should the investor outsource that decision to a rating agency? Complete transparency not only makes ratings an open source, ever improving, perhaps more quickly evolving tool, it forces the investor to take responsibility, too. And this cannot be underestimated in importance.

    By making ratings quantitative and completely transparent, investors must have opinions on model assumptions and inputs. It's up to them to decide whether the model can withstand exogenous shocks that they see around the corner -- like a housing collapse -- and to then justify buying a weakly structured mortgage-backed security.

    Bloomberg's tool wasn't necessarily designed to spark a revolution. It's a function on a terminal that provides 30,200 functions and is constantly adding new tools. It was designed to give users another way to analyze credit. But if the credit function is successful, it will show that ratings can provide the market function for which they were intended: just another opinion on credit quality.