Rating agencies and crisis (Flandreau, Gaillard and Packer)

To err is human: rating agencies and the interwar foreign government debt crisis by Marc Flandreau, Norbert Gaillard and Frank Packer. “During the 1930s, rating agencies took up a central role in regulatory supervision that they still have today. The proximate cause for this changeover was the economic shock of the Great Depression. This paper makes a contribution to this emerging literature on the history of rating by focusing on the assessment of foreign government debt US rating agencies during the interwar period”.