WASHINGTON — Moody's Investors Service ratings will be available on the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board's EMMA website later this year, ending the rating agency's long holdout from the site.
The MSRB began providing ratings from Fitch Ratings and Standard & Poor's on EMMA in 2011. Kroll Bond Rating Agency followed suit in September last year. With Moody's on board, visitors to EMMA will now be able to see ratings from every major agency.
"We are pleased that Moody's will provide its ratings for display on EMMA," said MSRB executive director Lynnette Kelly. "By providing data from another municipal credit ratings agency, the EMMA website will soon be an even more powerful tool for investors and other municipal market participants."
Moody's managing director Gail Sussman said she was happy the agency was able to reach agreement with the MSRB.
"The MSRB's EMMA site is a valuable source of information for municipal market participants, and we are pleased to make Moody's municipal ratings available on the site," Sussman said.
Moody's had taken heat for not participating sooner. The Government Finance Officers Association criticized the agency earlier this year, but Moody's countered that its ratings are available through its own website for free.
The MSRB said it expects to modify EMMA to accommodate Moody's ratings later this year, but declined to provide a more specific timeframe.
The GFOA is thrilled to see that Moody's will be joining Fitch, S&P and Kroll in posting their ratings on EMMA," said Dustin McDonald, director of the GFOA's Federal Liaison Center. "Since the creation of EMMA in 2009 GFOA has been urging credit rating agencies to provide automatic feeds of their ratings, and are grateful to the MSRB for their work in bringing Moody's into the fold. We now look forward to working with the SEC and MSRB to remove the duplicative burden on issuers of having to post credit rating changes on EMMA that are already being posted automatically by the credit rating agencies."
