Insights

The Reform Mirage: Why London’s ‘Debt Pause’ Plan Protects Creditors, Not Countries

Another market innovation has arrived out of London. The Bondholder Working Group of the London Coalition for Sustainable Sovereign Debt has published a consultative paper proposing ‘Broad Debt Pause Clauses’ for emerging market bonds. The language is careful, the formatting professional. The proposal promises standardised clauses, investor protections, and enhanced transparency designed to help developing countries weather crises. The document frames itself as responsive, consultative, and forward-looking. Read beyond the preamble, and what emerges is a mechanism that offers time under strict conditions - time granted only when creditors retain control over the terms, the triggers, and the vote. The pause depends on permission. That dependency reveals the proposal’s actual function: to manage creditor anxiety while appearing to address debtor distress.

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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