In this article published in The Economist’s Voice, Robert Pollin, James Heintz, and M. Ahmed Diomande of the New York State Senate Finance Committee  argue that the private ratings agencies —Moody’s, Standard & Poors, and Fitch—operate within a perverse incentive system. These agencies are hired by the very companies they purport to evaluate without bias, and financial companies tend to hire ratings agencies which  they deem likely to rate their instruments highly. The authors recommend a simple correction: a public ratings agency (which reserves the category of “not ratable” for any instrument they deem too complex to accurately assess) staffed by civil servants whose performance is evaluated on the basis of the correlation between their ratings and actual market performance over time.