Insights

The Natural Oligopoly: How Investors Keep the Rating Agencies in Power

Earlier this month (October), Andrew Bailey stood before the House of Lords Financial Services Regulation Committee and said something striking. When asked about private credit, he recalled what industry figures had told him: everything looked fine, apart from the role of the rating agencies. Then he asked, “Well, we’re not playing that movie again, are we?”

The question landed. Private credit is supposed to be the antithesis of the structured-finance mess that preceded 2008: bespoke, bilateral, informationally rich. Yet here was the Governor of the Bank of England warning that the same rating dependency that once made subprime mortgages opaque might be creeping into private markets. His concern is not about bad analysis. It runs deeper. The way the market communicates risk still runs through the rating agencies - not because they excel, but because the market has no other shared language.

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

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?

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

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