Wall Street at War. The Secret Struggle for the Global Economy

Many of the problems that lie at the heart of the current financial crisis stem from a significant but little-known development that occurred in the early 1980s: investors changed their investment criteria. This change gave rise to a conflict – a silent war – between executives in charge of the world's largest corporations, on the one hand, and credit agencies whose task it is to enforce the criteria on investors' behalf, on the other. The credit agencies that flourished in New York, London and elsewhere acquired a great deal of power because their ratings now reflected investors new priorities, and so controlled the ability of corporations to gain access to capital. The …