[Tietäjä]

Credit rating agencies are a funny bunch. Someone should punch a hole in them or at least put them under some supervisory organization. It's incredible how they've, as what essentially constitutes a private rent-seeking organization, managed to achieve a position of some divine righteousness. They're not infallible, they're really not much better at assessing risk than any other (proclaimed expert) is. For some reason, however, they're perceived "the neutral ground" or "the hand of god". I don't believe however that it is in their field of business to evaluate the impacts of a bank's technical systems to it's future functional capability.

Honestly, I'm quite convinced the triad could drive down a perfectly healthy a financial organization by systematically bombing it's ratings. It doesn't really matter if it'd all be facades and smoke bombs, but the major damage would be done before any of this would resolve. And probably, despite it, the rating agencies would maintain their position as the holy justice of the status quo. They have just that much power, why, I don't really know. Are financial institutions too dependant on them, lacking staff/expertise to analyze risk on their own, or are they just driving herds?

No bank has sufficient liquidity to cover all it's loans on spot. "Dipping" to customer funds in order to cover liquidity isn't necessarily anything dramatic as long as the balance sheets maintain qualification for whatever the local endorsement of Basel criteria are. In essense, dipping to customer funds is what has been the core of banking (through credit expansion) for all it's existance. Typically liquidity problems are temporary and not much of a hassle (unless made into hassle by certain people). They're called liquidity problems because the arise from the temporal components: the bank is wealthy enough to take care of their liabilities, however, because parts are obviously invested on long term, it's not necessarily possible to liquidate all assets on their true values on a spot moment.

That however doesn't really constitute as a portfolio issue or a risk as such, this is why in most development countries there are insurances in place not so much to soften the blows of bank runs but to alltogether prevent them, since most bank runs seem to be dictated by herd mentality rather than anything that'd have to do with the banks' portfolio. If a (most likely very) temporary technical problem ends up causing a run on a bank, this is a simple practical example of how a run doesn't have to have much to do with the balance sheet of the bank in question. Assuming there is sufficient insurance in place in the UK though, I don't see why this'd be particularily likely or why people would bother. But you never know.

If a triad member has downgraded a bank because of technical problems then someone needs to give them a proper spanking. If they've done it for reasons related to the bank's assets and liabilities, then they're just doing their job. It's becoming increasingly difficult however to distinguish when they're actually doing their job from when they're driving self-fulfilling prophecies for their own/someone else's good.