Insights

When the Agencies Disagree

Photo by Will Francis - AI & Marketing / Unsplash

On Thursday, October 9th, Reuters reported that S&P Global was widely expected to leave Italy’s rating unchanged at BBB+ with a stable outlook, even as the country’s deficit fell to 3 per cent of GDP for the first time since before COVID. Fitch, by contrast, had upgraded Italy only weeks earlier. Moody’s followed in May 2025, affirming its Baa3 rating but shifting the outlook to positive. Same country. Same data. Three verdicts.

The market still treats the Big Three credit rating agencies as a single voice. They are nothing of the sort. Each is an independent institution with its own hierarchy of what matters, its own temperament, and its own tolerance for risk. The differences between them are intentional and reveal how judgment operates in practice. The global language of credit is plural, not uniform, and those distinctions tell us as much about the agencies themselves as they do about the countries they assess.

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

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