The S&P Empire: From Railroad Manuals to Global Financial Benchmarks — The Complete History of Standard & Poor’s

If we define “S&P” precisely, it no longer refers to a single entity. In the narrow historical sense, Standard & Poor’s was the corporation formed in 1941 through the merger of Poor’s Publishing and Standard Statistics. In the broader modern sense, it later became part of McGraw-Hill, whose parent company was renamed S&P Global in 2016, and then expanded further through the 2022 merger with IHS Markit. Today, when people say “S&P,” they often mean three overlapping things at once: the credit ratings franchise, the index franchise, and the larger S&P Global group.

The real starting point of S&P was neither ratings nor the S&P 500. It was the commercialization of standardized market information. In 1860, Henry Varnum Poor published a major reference work on U.S. railroads and canals. In 1906, Luther Lee Blake founded Standard Statistics Bureau and used frequently updated index cards instead of slow-moving annual books. In 1941, the two information traditions merged. In 1957, the S&P 500 became one of the first major computer-generated equity benchmarks. In the decades that followed, the company expanded into databases, security identifiers, index licensing, workflow tools, and global data analytics. At its core, S&P has long been in the business of selling standards and decision infrastructure.

Henry Varnum Poor was the first foundational figure in this story. S&P Global’s official history traces the company to his 1860 publication, which it describes as the first attempt to equip investors with data on the rapidly expanding U.S. railroad industry. That framing matters because it shows that the original mission was not to issue abstract judgments first, but to create a structured, comparable, and credible information base for investors.

Publicly available biographical detail on Henry Poor is uneven, but several points are solid. He studied at Bowdoin College and is remembered there as part of its political-economy tradition. That suggests a background shaped less by pure trading and more by law, economic thought, and institutional analysis. By contrast, publicly available detail on Luther Lee Blake’s family background, education, and early life is much thinner. What is clearly established is that in 1906 he founded Standard Statistics Bureau to provide up-to-date information on non-railroad industrial companies, using portable data cards as a distribution innovation.

Before Standard & Poor’s formally existed, there were already two mature lines of business. The Poor line began with Henry Poor’s 1860 book and deepened with the 1868 publication of the Manual of the Railroads of the United States. The Standard line began in 1906 with Blake’s bureau and expanded in 1913 through the acquisition of Babson’s stock and bond card system. Both lines were solving the same structural problem: how to reduce uncertainty in investing by turning fragmented information into comparable form.

Ratings came later than many people assume. S&P Global’s official history says Poor’s Publishing issued its first credit rating in 1916, with Standard Statistics following in 1922. That means ratings were not the original product. They emerged out of earlier publishing, data compilation, and standardization work. This explains why the company historically straddled ratings, directories, indexes, databases, and research rather than operating as a pure ratings house from the beginning.

Another key turning point came in 1923, when Standard Statistics created its first stock market index covering 233 U.S. companies on a market-cap-weighted weekly basis. This matters because the famous S&P 500 did not appear out of nowhere in 1957. It was the result of an earlier indexing tradition that began smaller, expanded in scope, and then became computationally scalable. Britannica’s account of the S&P 500 also supports that developmental arc from an earlier, smaller composite toward the 500-stock benchmark launched in 1957.

The 1941 merger that created Standard & Poor’s should not be read as a purely triumphant “strong meets strong” story. S&P Global’s official history emphasizes the merger’s expanded capabilities, but contemporary reporting in Time adds crucial context: both businesses had been pressured by the Great Depression, Poor’s Publishing had earlier gone bankrupt and was rescued by Paul Talbot Babson, and Standard Statistics had also struggled under a cost structure built for a much hotter market. The merger was therefore both strategic and defensive.

After the merger, the company went through several decisive structural upgrades. In 1957 it launched the S&P 500, described by S&P Global as the world’s most tracked index and one of the first to use electronic punch-card systems. In 1964 it introduced Compustat, which provided standardized long-run company financial data. In 1966 it joined McGraw-Hill, gaining scale and corporate backing. In 1969 it created the CUSIP numbering system, which became foundational to global securities identification, although that business was ultimately sold by S&P Global to FactSet in 2022.

Global expansion later came through partnerships and acquisitions as much as through organic growth. The company’s own history identifies CRISIL as a major node in India, while CRISIL’s own historical materials show that S&P first formed a strategic alliance in 1996, took an equity stake in 1997, and gained majority control in 2005. In 2012, S&P Dow Jones Indices was formed as a joint venture combining S&P and Dow Jones index businesses; 2025 disclosures still show a 27% minority interest structure tied to CME-related partners. In 2016, McGraw Hill Financial officially rebranded as S&P Global. In 2022, S&P Global completed its merger with IHS Markit, transforming itself into a much broader information-services platform.

The modern company’s economics demonstrate how S&P turned influence into recurring cash flow. In Ratings, revenue comes from new issuance, loan ratings, surveillance, entity ratings, and analytics. In Indices, revenue comes from asset-linked fees on ETFs and mutual funds, exchange-traded derivatives royalties, over-the-counter licensing, and index subscription services. In 2025, S&P Global generated $15.336 billion in revenue, with subscription revenue accounting for 51% of the total. The Ratings segment produced $4.724 billion of revenue, while Indices produced $1.850 billion, including $1.206 billion in asset-linked fees.

The scale of the franchise is not merely symbolic. S&P Global Ratings says it has more than one million credit ratings outstanding and over 1,500 credit analysts. SEC statistics for year-end 2024 show that S&P alone had 1,066,386 outstanding ratings out of 2,150,014 across all registered NRSROs. The Indices business is similarly embedded in markets: 2025 ETF ending AUM linked to its benchmarks reached $5.48 trillion. These facts help explain why S&P is best understood not just as a brand, but as a financial infrastructure institution.

Today, S&P Global is led by Martina Cheung. Its 2025 annual report shows more than 40,000 employees, $61.2 billion in total assets, and five main operating divisions with revenue in Market Intelligence, Ratings, Energy, Mobility, and Indices. In 2025 the company announced a planned spin-off of Mobility; however, public 2026 leadership materials still list Mobility within the group, so the best evidence suggests that the separation had been announced but not fully completed by June 2026. That is a cautious inference based on contemporaneous public documents.

The company’s greatest controversies center on its ratings role before and after the 2008 financial crisis. In 2013, the U.S. Department of Justice sued S&P over allegedly inflated ratings on RMBS and CDO products. In 2015, the DOJ and state partners reached a $1.375 billion settlement with S&P and McGraw Hill Financial, while California noted that separate related settlements brought the broader total to $1.5 billion. The same year, the SEC announced fraud charges tied to CMBS rating misconduct, leading to another major settlement. In 2024, S&P Global Ratings also agreed to pay a $20 million SEC penalty over electronic communications recordkeeping failures.

The deepest long-run criticism of S&P is structural rather than episodic. The same group can simultaneously function as a ratings authority, an index authority, a data provider, and a standard-setter for capital markets. Even where legal and compliance walls exist, critics argue that too much quasi-public authority is concentrated in too few firms. Yet markets continue to rely on S&P precisely because its standards are deeply embedded in investment mandates, regulation, ETF construction, derivatives markets, and everyday media shorthand. This is why S&P remains both indispensable and contested.

The main limitations in the public record are these. First, there is much less public biographical detail on Luther Lee Blake than on Henry Varnum Poor. Second, the finer details of Henry Poor’s family class position and childhood environment are not well documented in easily accessible public sources. Third, some secondary sources differ slightly on the earliest rating dates, while S&P Global’s own official history states that Poor’s issued its first credit rating in 1916 and Standard followed in 1922; on balance, the company’s official chronology is the safest reference point.