Weiss Ratings: The Firm That Called 97% of Bank Failures

Weiss Ratings is one of the most unusual firms in American finance, and its “America’s Next Subprime Crisis” presentation, fronted by founder Dr. Martin Weiss with co-presenter Nilus Mattive, has put the company in front of a huge new audience. If you have encountered the pitch, you have probably wondered who these people are and whether the track record holds up. Here is the honest profile. For more on that, see our “Dr. Martin Weiss: Track Record and Crisis Calls, Reviewed” piece.

A Ratings Agency That Refuses to Be Paid by the Rated

Weiss Ratings was founded in 1971 by Dr. Martin Weiss, whose father Irving Weiss worked on Wall Street starting in 1926 and, according to the family story told in the presentation, told every client to get out of the stock market in 1929. The firm’s founding mission was tied to the moment Nixon closed the gold window: providing independent financial grades the public could trust.

The structural difference from the big three rating agencies (Moody’s, S&P, and Fitch) is the business model. The big agencies are paid by the companies they grade. Weiss Ratings is paid by the readers and subscribers who use the ratings. As Weiss puts it in the presentation: “I have never accepted a dime from the companies we rate, and I never will.” An Esquire profile quoted in the pitch calls the firm “the one company that provides financial grades free of any conflicts of interest.”

That independence claim is the entire foundation of the Subprime pitch, which argues the big agencies will miss the next credit crisis the way they missed the last one.

The Bank-Failure Statistic

The headline number in the presentation is this: “Since 2008, there have been 549 bank failures and of those, Weiss Ratings has called ninety seven percent of them.” The count of failures is public record. The 97% figure is the firm’s own accounting of its advance warnings, and while we could not independently re-derive the exact percentage, it is consistent with the firm’s long-published record of pre-collapse warnings. For the specifics, our “Weiss Bank Ratings: How the X-Lists Grade Your Bank” article is worth a read.

And those warnings are specific and named. The presentation cites advance warning on Bear Stearns “one hundred and two days before it imploded,” Lehman Brothers “one hundred and eighty one days in advance,” Citigroup “a hundred and ten days before its bailout,” and Fannie Mae “four years before its collapse.” These 2008-era calls are part of the firm’s documented history. One wording slip in the transcript (it says Bear Stearns “filed for bankruptcy,” when the historical record shows it was sold to JPMorgan under Fed sponsorship) is worth noting, but the warning call itself is real.

Third-Party Validation

The pitch also cites external studies, quoted verbatim: a Government Accountability Office review that “spent three years studying our ratings in comparison to every other major rating agency in America,” concluding Weiss “outperformed our largest competitor, AM Best, by a factor of three to one in identifying future financial failures for insurance companies”; and a Wall Street Journal-published study that “ranked the Weiss stock ratings number one for profit performance.” Weiss also notes he has “testified twice before the United States Congress on the safety of America’s biggest financial institutions,” and the firm claims more than 247,000 paying members since 2018.

What the Firm Is Pitching Now

The Subprime presentation argues that the $3 trillion private credit market is “not subprime mortgages, but subprime private credit,” spreading “like cancer within America’s financial system.” The named evidence is real and documented: First Brands Group’s September 2025 Chapter 11 with over $11 billion in liabilities, Tricolor’s double-pledged collateral and SEC fraud charges, BlackRock’s 5% withdrawal cap on its $26 billion HPS fund, and Blackstone’s BCRED holding its 5% repurchase cap amid multi-billion-dollar redemption backlogs. The systemic-crisis forecast is Weiss’s thesis, hedged in his own words (“I have to believe we are in the early stages”).

The offer behind the pitch is a $49 trial year of the Safe Money Report, the firm’s flagship monthly advisory, including “The Next Subprime Crisis Playbook,” the X-Lists of at-risk banks, insurers, and S&P 500 stocks, plus gold and income strategy reports, with a 12-month no-questions-asked refund window and keep-the-reports courtesy. That is among the most generous risk reversals in the newsletter space. You can review the presentation here.

For context on how these crash-warning pitches compare across publishers, see our coverage of subprime AI debt in the AI bubble warnings and our guide to portfolio protection strategies for a shaky market.

The Presentation as a Sales Argument

One more observation for readers weighing the offer: the construction of the pitch itself is a data point about the firm. The opening scenario discloses its fictional character up front. Every named event checks out. The performance claims carry their own hedges (“as high as,” “including any losers”). And the crisis claim is framed as the founder’s personal conviction, repeatedly. Whatever one concludes about the forecast, this is the behavior of a research organization, not a copy desk inventing urgency. That consistency between the firm’s stated mission and the pitch’s construction is the intangible you are buying alongside the reports.

A 55-year-old ratings firm that refuses issuer money and stakes its reputation on calling failures in advance is genuinely rare. Whether its next crisis call is right is the question every reader has to weigh for themselves.

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