Right. Now that you say that it's pretty obvious. Non profit means altruistic, free from greed. So the ratings agencies should be run like Habitat for Humanity.
Your wishful thinking. Would you do financial analyses for a hobby? All that after you paid for college degree?
I was being sarcastic. No I wouldn't. You could probably pay people within a non profit, or not for profit, but I'm pretty sure their work would be mediocre.
I think there is widespread confusion here both on the concept of a non-profit and the concept that there are humans in the world not motivated purely by making large sums of money. First, it seems obvious but non-profit employees are not volunteers. In fact non-profits like the Gates Foundation are built on the idea that if you pay competitive salaries and benefits you can attract top employees to a non-profit. I'd challenge any of you here to claim that Gates Foundation employees or their work are "mediocre". The world is full of very intelligent, highly motivated individuals, who could be making significantly more in the private sector but choose to work for government, non-profits, and NGOs. I've personally served with many in the military. To dismiss all these individuals as "mediocre" simply because they're not motivated by money in the same way you are is very shallow at best and says far more about you than them if you hold that view. The primary difference between a non-profit and for-profit is the fiduciary duty of the employees. In a for-profit, including the ratings agencies, the employee's fiduciary duty is to the owner of the company. For Moody's, for example, which is a publically traded company, the employee's fiduciary duty is to maximize profits for shareholders. Not to have accurate credit ratings, that's only their fiduciary duty to the extent that accurate credit ratings align with maximizing profits for shareholders. For a non-profit, the employee's fiduciary duty is to the goals of the non-profit. If the non-profit is a credit rating agency, the employee's fiduciary duty could very well be to provide accurate credit ratings, full stop. It's not a given that a non-profit could do a better job than the current credit ratings agencies, but it certainly seems it would be a big advantage for employees of a credit rating agency to have a fiduciary duty to provide accurate credit ratings rather than to maximize profit for their shareholders.
The employees of a rating agency don't have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders. The corporation does. Big difference.
I'm also skeptical that a nonprofit can attract the same quality of talent as a corporation. Money might be a motivation for some.