The SEC staff has issued a report to Congress on credit rating standardization required by Section 939(h)(1) of the Dodd-Frank Act. The SEC staff recommended that the SEC not take any further action at this time with respect to:

• standardizing credit rating terminology, so that all credit rating agencies issue credit ratings using identical terms;
• standardizing the market stress conditions under which ratings are evaluated;
• requiring a quantitative correspondence between credit ratings and a range of default probabilities and loss expectations under standardized conditions of economic stress; and
• standardizing credit rating terminology across asset classes, so that named ratings correspond to a standard range of default probabilities and expected losses independent of asset class and issuing entity.

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