The founder of a new credit ratings agency argues that the industry needs a shake-up
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Newly created Kroll Bond Rating rated its first residential mortgage-backed security, the latest upcoming offering from Redwood Trust (RWT: 11.18 -2.87%).
Kroll began putting together its senior management team in July 2010 and handled its first commercial MBS last summer.
Kroll Bond Rating Agency has published its inaugural RMBS presale report, having assigned preliminary ratings to eight classes of mortgage pass-through certificates from Sequoia Mortgage Trust 2012-1. The transaction is secured by two pools of first-lien residential mortgage loans secured by one-to-four family residential properties, condominiums, coops, planned unit developments and townhouses.
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Kroll Bond Ratings CEO Jules Kroll weighs in on the nation's finances
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Kroll Bond Ratings Executive Vice President Jerome Fons appears on OJ Live to discuss the Jefferson County bankruptcy and why investors shouldn't fear the municipal bond market. View
A new study by the Kroll Bond Rating Agency on municipal bond defaults dating back to the Great Depression casts a positive light on the muni industry, saying there will be "no material increase" in defaults over the next three to five years. View
A new study on nearly a century of municipal-bond defaults showed that many of the cities that missed debt payments during the Great Depression wouldn't have today, giving weight to the argument that the current economic slowdown will tip few state and local governments into default. View
West Haven, Connecticut, which has closed four school buildings over the past two years and fired 14 teachers to help cut its budget deficit, is about to pay Moody’s Investors Service almost double what it cost six years ago for a credit rating. View
Refuting the idea that a meltdown in the municipal bond market is near, with Jules Kroll, K2 Global Consulting, Kroll Bond Ratings chairman. View
State and local governments are unlikely to experience a “material increase” in municipal defaults during the next three to five years, according to a study by Kroll Bond Rating Agency. View
Gary Krellenstein is moving to where he thinks the action in munis is - credit analysis. View
If the overflow lunch crowd at the Pension Real Estate Association's conference was any indication, institutional investors and money managers are eager to get a fix on real estate's place in an uncertain global economy. View
Several underdogs in the credit-rating business are stepping up their challenge to the industry's three giants. View
Small credit-rating firms complain that proposed rules requiring analysts to do more training are too costly and would help larger firms without addressing the errors that contributed to the financial crisis. View
Jules Kroll plans to bring his bond ratings agency to the UK next year after receiving an enthusiastic response from issuers and investors in the City of London. View
Kroll Bond Ratings Agency CEO Jules Kroll on the research and due diligence the firm is doing to give investors better ratings and information.
ViewJules Kroll, founder and chief executive officer of Kroll Bond Ratings Inc., and Bloomberg's Jim Sterngold talks about Standard & Poor's decision to replace President Deven Sharma with Citibank NA Chief Operating Officer Douglas Peterson. Kroll and Sterngold also discuss the outlook for credit rating companies. They speak with Pimm Fox on Bloomberg Television's "Taking Stock." Bloomberg's Jim Sterngold also speaks.
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Even as national governments cry foul over recent sovereign ratings downgrades, new rules and regulation aimed at rating agencies is making it harder for newcomers to break into the ratings market. Standard & Poor's (S&P), Moody's Investors Service and Fitch Ratings may have come under renewed fire because of the sovereign debt crisis, but rules set out in the United States' 2006 Credit Rating Agency Reform Act and the Dodd-Frank Act have yet to open up the market as hoped.
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For banks, the supervisory grade known as a "Camels" score is a critical and confidential yardstick of strength. But for many in the public, it is a riddle too tantalizing to ignore.
ViewIf there were any doubt about the extent to which credit ratings have become embedded in the financial system, the gyrations of markets since Friday's U.S. downgrade should have dispelled it. Policy makers around the world are making well-intentioned efforts to reduce the influence of Moody's, Standard & Poor's and Fitch. But one of the unintended consequences of the crisis may be to embed ratings even further. View
The downgrade of the U.S. credit rating from triple-A to AA-plus by the credit rating agency Standard & Poor's may not sound like a big deal, but it marks the first time since 1941 that the U.S. government hasn't carried the highest rating at any of the major ratings agencies, and it hit global financial markets like a bombshell. View
Founder of Kroll Bond Ratings Jules Kroll discusses where he thinks S&P, Fitch and Moody's went wrong and why public pensions could be at risk next for a downgrade. View
Jerome Fons appears on CNBC View
First, Standard & Poor's downgraded U.S. debt from AAA to AA+. Now critics in and out of government are returning fire -- downgrading the credit rating company rhetorically and perhaps soon putting it under a more official microscope. View
The Obama administration's response to the downgrade of the U.S. credit rating has been nearly identical to that of other countries that have suffered the ignominious hit to their reputations: attacking the messenger. In doing so, the administration is arguing that the United States is different from the rest of the world. View
A dozen US states have triple A ratings and analysts are keeping a close watch on states with high levels of federal aid as a percentage of total revenues. View
Standard & Poor's unprecedented decision to strip the U.S. of its top credit rating was the downgrade heard around the world. View
Kroll Bond Ratings CEO Jules Kroll on the lack of credibility of credit rating agencies and the risk of a downgrade still facing the U.S. government. View
Standard & Poor's Ratings Services left the threat of a downgrade hanging over the U.S., declining to tell anxious lawmakers on Wednesday whether rival tax and spending plans floated in Washington would save the U.S.'s triple-A credit rating. View
Good morning, Chairman Neugebauer, Ranking Member Capuano, and members of the subcommittee. Thank you for inviting me to today's hearing on "Oversight of Credit Rating Agencies Post-Dodd-Frank" to help you examine the effects of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act ("Dodd-Frank") on credit rating agencies one year after its enactment. View 
Last month, in a post headlined "how the mortgage industry lies with statistics", I bemoaned the fact that I couldn't find good real data to compare to the massaged data which went into this chart... View
Jerome Fons, an executive vice president at Kroll Bond Ratings Inc., discusses the outlook for the U.S. credit rating if the government fails to increase the debt limit, leading to a default. Standard & Poor's said it would lower the U.S.'s sovereign top-level AAA ranking to D and Moody's Investors Service said it will probably reduce its rating if the U.S. can't pay its debt. Fons speaks with Erik Schatzker on Bloomberg Television's "InsideTrack." (Source: Bloomberg) View
It's been like old times for CMBS dealmakers this week. Four new offerings have hit the street looking to raise $3.24 billion. And just like in the mid 2000s heyday, we're seeing new players jumping into the arena for the first time, and the return of high loan-to-values, low debt service coverage and interest-only loans. View
As regulators remove references to credit-rating firms from federal rules, institutional investors should also rethink how they use the ratings, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Mary Schapiro said. View
Bank of America has launched an effort to securitize a $410 million mortgage that it provided for the Fashion Centre at Pentagon City, a 990,392-square-foot upscale mall in Arlington, Va. View
Kroll Bond Rating, a ratings agency that launched this year to nab market share from Moody's, Standard & Poor's and Fitch, rated its first single-borrower commercial mortgage-backed securities transaction this week. View
Newcomer Kroll Bond Ratings rated its first structured finance transaction, a so-called single-borrower CMBS for $410 million backed by a Bank of America loan for the Fashion Center mall at Pentagon City, in Arlington, Va. View
Kroll Bond Rating Agency on Tuesday issued its first assessment in the commercial mortgage-backed securities market as it seeks to make inroads in a business long dominated by a narrow field of rating companies. View
Over the past year, Kroll Bond Rating Agency, Inc. (KBRA) has staked out a claim in the highly-profitable and much-criticized world of credit ratings. View
There`s a new player in the business of rating the credit quality of companies and financial institutions -- Kroll bond ratings. Jules Kroll is best known for doing investigative intelligence work for corporations. But now, he wants to shake things up in an industry that`s been blamed for the financial crisis. I asked him why he decided to get into the ratings game. View
Credit rating companies spent much of the last two years watching their backs as regulators tried to enforce change on the "fall guys" of the credit crunch. Having emerged from this gloomy tunnel, the outlook looks bright with bond issuance driving profits, prompting many analysts to raise their forecasts. But out of nowhere comes a brand new competitor in Kroll Bond Ratings. View
Can Jules Kroll shake up the credit rating industry? He certainly has the brand name to muscle into the market. View
FEW people ever penetrate the dark side of money, but Jules Kroll is one of them. View
Jules Kroll's new American bond ratings business is investigating opportunities in Europe and Asia in a bid to become a global rating agency. View
It can readily be argued that one of the reasons behind the global financial crisis was the mispricing of risk. Its been a long held tenet in lending that higher risk borrowers pay a higher rate of interest in order to compensate the lender for assuming the greater risk of default.... View
Bond rating executive discusses need for better due diligence View
He built an investigations firm into a global giant. With his new venture in credit ratings, he hopes to set an example View
Kroll Bond Ratings is moving more quickly than originally anticipated to rate municipal bonds because of a growing relationship with startup bond insurer BondFactor Co., a company executive said Friday. View
Two years after the financial crisis shattered investors' faith in the Big Three credit rating firms, a new competitor entered the market Wednesday, promising a more forensic approach to assessing the risk of mortgage-backed securities and other structured-finance transactions. View
Kroll Bond Rating is capping its second day of work since launching an official marketing campaign yesterday. Eric Williamson, a residential mortgage-backed securities analyst at the firm, is already anticipating some activity on the private-label side. View
After selling his famed investigative firm, Jules Kroll is back in business with a simple but ambitious objective: to re-create, and create trust, credit ratings. View
The man who took on Saddam and Marcos is trying to break up the Big Three credit-ratings cartel. Can he pull it off? View
Who needs Standard & Poor's or Moody's when you can hire a detective instead? View
He founded Kroll Bond Rating Agency last year and he has now bought a little firm called Lace Financial, which has a rating agency licence, so he is good to challenge the big boys. View
The financial crisis poured discredit on to rating agencies that has yet to be dispelled. Moves are now underway to restore their reputation as essential and reliable tools. Jerome Fons, executive vice-president at Kroll Bond Ratings, writes. View
Onetime corporate sleuth Jules Kroll has acquired a small credit-ratings firm, in an effort to get licenses needed to go up against S&P, Moody's and Fitch. View
Jules Kroll, chairman of K2 Global, shares his views on Washington once again taking aim at ratings agencies. View
The corporate investigator Jules Kroll, who founded the world's paramount financial detective agency, is training his sights on the tainted credit ratings industry with a 'sceptical' service expected to begin scrutinising investment instruments as early as July.
Kroll, 68, says his new firm, Kroll Bond Ratings, will use the same due diligence skills that built his security organisation. He plans to go beyond arithmetical modelling to dig deeper into the properties and mortgages behind controversial collateralised securities.
"There's been virtually no scepticism, no fact-finding," Kroll told US National Public Radio. "It's been the acceptance of what's been presented by people seeking to raise money." View
In this NPR interview, Jules discusses the creation of his new credit ratings agency, Kroll Bond Ratings. View
Enter Kroll Bond Ratings, which is to open in late summer. Its founder Jules Kroll, well-known in the esoteric field of forensic accounting, bets that from now on, investors will demand due diligence before they purchase another complex security packaged by Wall Street and given an investment-grade rating by a ratings agency. View
Jules Kroll, chairman of K2 Global, shares his views on Washington taking aim at ratings agencies once again. View
Jules Kroll appears on the Business News Network's Midday Markets program discussing plans to launch a risk rating agency. View
Jules Kroll, the man who reinvented the detective agency as the modern multinational corporate security firm, now intends to apply his powers of deduction to the credit ratings industry. Mr Kroll plans to start a business to challenge the big three credit rating agencies in the first quarter of next year. The company, which aims to have $100m in annual turnover by the end of its third year, will specialise in giving second-opinion ratings on complex securitised products. View
Jules Kroll, chairman of K2 Global, is creating a new company that he says will bring credibility back to the tarnished credit ratings arena. View
