Discussion of The role of financial reporting in debt contracting and in stewardship by Lakshmanan Shivakumar (2013) created by Trevor Pitman

My role at Fitch is that of Regional Credit Officer, which is a role that looks across the whole portfolio of our ratings, whether they be sovereign ratings, structured finance ratings or corporate finance ratings, looking at the trends in those ratings and trying to bring to the attention of those who are setting the ratings in the ratings groups the different factors. Sometimes they can be accounting factors; sometimes they can be factors in the wider markets. In responding to the comments and how I see the role of the ratings agency, I certainly agree with some of the underlying points that Shivakumar is making. We have to be alert to the agency problems that are raised. That is critical to our analysis. An example discussed a great deal in the media, seemingly continuously, is that of bankers’ behaviour and the effect that had on shareholders, and indeed what the rest of society expected from bankers. That is certainly something that we need to be critically aware of. The debt equity conflict Shivakumar raised is certainly always implicit in our analysis because we are rating fixed-income instruments, although we do not make it explicit in all the analyses that we do. We cannot do that in every single analysis of the thousands of ratings that we have. Of course it is particularly prevalent for companies that have very low credit ratings, companies that have been leveraged up maybe through mergers and acquisitions (M&A) or primarily through M&A–certainly those in the lower single B territory of the rating range–the debt equity conflict is absolutely explicit in our analysis and is reflected in the rating there. Shivakumar devotes significant attention to the importance of financial accounts. Of course, from our perspective they play an absolutely central role in what we do. Shivakumar commented that they play an important role in both formal and implicit contracts; they certainly do that. False, incorrect information makes our job virtually impossible to do; we may be unable to rate an entity because we do not have good information to do so. If the accounting data are being manipulated, or excessive discretion is being used in connection with it, our rating would be based on