Moody's

Moody's matters most to investors who need a quick read on credit risk, and its ratings shape how borrowing is priced across markets. By our assessment, its core strength is the long-running credit-rating system for governments, banks and companies, backed by deep financial analysis and a huge amount of market attention. The obvious downside is that a rating business carries real influence, which also means it gets watched and argued over whenever risk is misread or late to show up. In practice Moody's is less a product you use than a framework the finance world reacts to, with reports, scales and letter grades doing most of the work. It sits alongside S&P Global Ratings and Fitch, and those three names form the narrow top tier people usually mean when they talk about the big rating agencies. The company also has a broader analytics side, but the rating arm is still the name most people know. Moody's is an American company, and that suits the way its judgments travel through global debt markets.