Financial practitioners, including regulators, must radically improve governance to bolster both the financial system itself and the broader social contract. Poor financial sector governance undermines us all by relentlessly warping price signals, directing investment to sub-optimal uses, and periodically spawning full-blown crises.
Croatan Institute improves systemic governance in the global debt and derivative sectors by improving the regulatory and credit rating components of deal templates. Our method is to beat the financial lobby at its own game by producing best-practice technical work, placing it in the public record of regulatory and credit rating companies, and disseminating the work widely. We are a global authority on memorializing and calling out governance failures that adulterate debt and derivative contracts worldwide, proposing fixes, and analyzing other ESG exposures in the financial system.
Marilyn Waite of Climate Finance Fund, Daniel Cash of The Credit Rating Research Initiative, and Senior Fellow Bill Harrington proposed a seven-point plan for improving ESG ratings to the European Union.
Bill’s counterproposal calls out the IOSCO negligence in conflating ESG analytics with credit ratings.
Senior Fellow Bill Harrington’s Croatan View on IOSCO and how its members must not direct ESG analytics providers on how to govern themselves.
On June 14, Senior Fellow Bill Harrington submitted a 46-page public comment on deficient-to-nonexistent climate and ESG content in credit rating companies to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Croatan Institute Senior Fellow Bill Harrington leads a discussion on new frontiers in bondholder engagement with a diverse group of leading financial activists and engaged fixed-income investors.
In the rush to help struggling companies and prop up debt markets during the COVID crisis, the Federal Reserve has undermined a major reform Congress made in response to the Great Recession: don’t rely on credit ratings.
Croatan Institute will convene the Croatan Forum 2020 at The Rickhouse in Durham, NC on April 27-29, 2020.
In this Croatan Forum session, panelists discuss what is needed to transform the financial sector into a contributor to a more robust economy and country.
This working paper argues that some financial products labelled “green” or “ESG” embed features that undermine financial sustainability and are thus at odds with the sustainability principles implied in green and ESG product ratings.
Mailing Address
PO Box 2044
Durham, NC 27702
(919) 794-7440
Physical Address
201 West Main St
Suite B013
Durham, NC 27701
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