The LSE Directory / Credit rating agencies
Moody's Investors Service is the credit rating division of Moody's Corporation, publishing independent opinions on the creditworthiness of debt issuers and individual debt instruments across sovereign, sub-sovereign, corporate, financial institution and structured finance markets. Ratings run on a letter scale from Aaa, the highest quality, down to C, generally reserved for default, with numerical modifiers of 1, 2 and 3 attached to every rating from Aa through Caa. On March 6, 2024 the unit was formally renamed Moody's Ratings, closing out 110 years under the Investors Service name; its non-ratings sister division, formerly Moody's Analytics, was shortened to simply Moody's in the same rebrand. This entry covers the ratings business specifically. Alongside S&P Global Ratings and Fitch Ratings it forms the "Big Three" that dominate global credit rating, whose opinions are written into bond covenants, bank capital rules and institutional investment mandates. Moody's Ratings covers more than 35,000 rated entities and transactions worldwide under roughly 202 published rating methodologies, and has held Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organization (NRSRO) status from the US Securities and Exchange Commission since 1975, plus equivalent registration with the European Securities and Markets Authority, giving its ratings formal regulatory standing in bank and insurer capital rules rather than purely informational use. The business traces to John Moody's 1900 "Moody's Manual of Industrial and Miscellaneous Securities" and his 1909 "Analysis of Railroad Investments," which applied letter grades to roughly 1,300 railroad bonds and is generally credited as the first published bond ratings. It incorporated as Moody's Investors Service in 1914, was owned by Dun & Bradstreet from 1962, and was spun off as an independent public company, NYSE: MCO, on September 30, 2000; Berkshire Hathaway has held a large equity stake in the parent, on the order of 13 percent in recent filings, dating back to around that spinoff. Moody's Corporation split into its current two segment structure, ratings and non-ratings analytics, in 2007. Michael West is CEO of the Ratings segment; Rob Fauber is CEO of parent Moody's Corporation, headquartered at 7 World Trade Center in New York. In 2021 the EU regulator ESMA fined five Moody's group entities a combined 3.7 million euros for failing to disclose shareholder conflicts of interest on ratings issued in 2019 and 2020. The Ratings segment reported revenue of 5.916 billion US dollars in 2023, against roughly 71 trillion dollars of total rated debt outstanding. On May 16, 2025 Moody's downgraded the US sovereign rating one notch, from Aaa to Aa1, changing the outlook from negative to stable and citing rising federal debt and deficits. The move made Moody's the last of the Big Three to strip the US of a top rating, a status the country had held with Moody's since 1917, following S&P's 2011 downgrade and Fitch's 2023 downgrade.
