Bulletin n. 2-3/2013
February 2014
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Paudyn Bartholomew
    Credit rating agencies and the sovereign debt crisis: Performing the politics of creditworthiness through risk and uncertainty
    in Review of International Political Economy , Volume 20, Issue 4, 2013 ,  2013 ,  788-818
    As member states struggle to retain the investment grades necessary to allow them to finance their governmental operations at a reasonable cost, credit rating agencies (CRAs) have been blamed for exacerbating a procyclical bias which only makes this task more difficult. How CRAs contribute to the constitution of the politics of limits underpinning the European sovereign debt crisis is at the core of this article. As a socio-technical device of control, sovereign ratings are an ‘illocutionary' statement about budgetary health, which promotes an artificial fiscal normality. Subsequently, these austere politics of creditworthiness have ‘perlocutionary' effects, which seek to censure political discretion through normalizing risk techniques aligned with the self-systemic, and thereby self-regulating, logic of Anglo-American versions of capitalism. The ensuing antagonistic relationship between the programmatic/expertise and operational/politics dimensions of fiscal governance leaves Europe vulnerable to crisis and the renegotiation of how the ‘political' is established in the economy. New regulatory technical standards (RTS) can exacerbated the performative effects on CRAs, investors and member states.
    ©2001 - 2020 - Centro Studi sul Federalismo - P. IVA 94067130016