Scott Burns, a popular personal finance and business writer out of Dallas, is recommending in an upcoming column that the U.S. government establish a regulator to oversee the rating practices of companies like Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, according to a press release issued by Burns’ company, AssetBuilder.

Burns will be making that suggestion in a column that also includes insight from Boston University Economics Professor Laurence Kotlikoff.
“The credit crisis has lots of fathers,” Burns and Kotlikoff write in a Univeral Press Syndicate column that will be available this Sunday. “But the ‘See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil’ practice of the rating companies has the closest-matching DNA. Like Enron’s accountants, the rating agencies knew where their bread was buttered. Now we have trillions of dollars of securities that no one is willing to touch.”
They added, “We need to put an end to insider rating. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke should call for the establishment of an FFA—A Federal Financial Authority.”
According to Burns and Kotlikoff, the new proposed agency would be able to rate securities backed by subprime and the subprime products themselves as high risk, while also determining the safety of investment banks, insurance companies, hedge funds and commercial banks.