Credit Ratings

The Vanishing AAA: How Ratings Have Redefined ‘Safe’ Debt

In 1984, when the FTSE World Government Bond Index launched, it captured something close to perfection. Nearly every government bond in the index carried a triple-A rating. The world’s safest assets, neatly packaged and weighted, offering investors a map of pristine sovereign credit. Today, that map tells a different story. Only 11% of the index’s issuance is rated triple-A, while 57% now sits at double-A. The United States - the issuer that anchors global finance - lost its last AAA rating in May 2025. What was once a universe of flawless credit has become something more ordinary, more human. The question is whether this shift reveals something about the world, or something about the agencies that rate it.

The WGBI’s transformation offers a perfect case study in how these agencies do not just measure creditworthiness, they define what counts as safe in the first place.

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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