Dr Daniel Cash

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Daniel Cash

From Mauritius #3: What If the Machine Is Better?

From Mauritius #3: What If the Machine Is Better?

The question came near the end of the panel that I was on in the second day of the 2nd Annual Conference on Credit Ratings in Mauritius. I am paraphrasing, but it went roughly like this: given how quickly AI models are improving and how great artificial intelligence may become,

The Hierarchy of Evaluative Authority: Credit Rating Agencies and the Limits of Evaluative Autonomy

The Hierarchy of Evaluative Authority: Credit Rating Agencies and the Limits of Evaluative Autonomy

Executive Summary In the spring and summer of 2026, three of the world’s most consequential financial institutions found themselves on the receiving end of a contest usually reserved for the governments and companies they evaluate. On 22 April, twenty-three Republican state attorneys general wrote to Fitch, Moody’s

Who Decides What Creditworthiness Means?

Who Decides What Creditworthiness Means?

Executive Summary Pedro Lange Machado’s 2026 paper argues that sovereign credit rating agencies embed a market-liberal theory of the state into the technical apparatus of creditworthiness, rewarding fiscal restraint and creditor protection while penalising the debt restructuring and public investment that climate adaptation requires. This essay accepts that

From Mauritius #2: Learning the Rating Game

From Mauritius #2: Learning the Rating Game

It was announced today that the Annual Conference on Credit Ratings will now meet every year, and that Mauritius will be its home for the foreseeable future. In the room it passed as housekeeping, the sort of notice that sits between a coffee break and the next panel, and I

From Mauritius #1: The Psychology of Building an Institution

From Mauritius #1: The Psychology of Building an Institution

I have spent my entire career studying an industry that does not change. That is an exaggeration, but a deliberate one. Ownership has changed hands, regulation has arrived on both sides of the Atlantic, business models have shifted and new participants have entered the market. What has barely moved is

Country Context and the Architecture of a Credit Rating

Country Context and the Architecture of a Credit Rating

A new IMF Working Paper examines how much weight sovereign ratings place on existing debt, forecast primary balances and other factors (Blanchard and others, 2026). The authors build a deliberately simple model linking debt dynamics to the probability of default and compare it with S&P Global, Moody’s

Senegal’s Credit Story Changes Shape: What the debt treatment means for the sovereign’s ratings, creditors, and path back to market access

Senegal’s Credit Story Changes Shape: What the debt treatment means for the sovereign’s ratings, creditors, and path back to market access

On the afternoon of 1 September 2026, Senegal’s finance ministry and the IMF released, within hours of each other, two statements that might look, on a first read, like they were pulling apart. The first announced that IMF staff and Senegalese authorities had reached agreement on the policies underpinning