Weekend Economists Commemorate the Dark Knight July 25-27, 2014

[MattSh]

26. M of A - Ukraine: Financial Rating Propaganda Likely To Fail

International credit rating agencies like S&P are nothing but political instruments. Consider this from July 11:

Ukraine had its credit-rating outlook raised to stable from negative by Standard & Poor’s after the country obtained a $17 billion bailout loan from the International Monetary Fund.
...
“Full disbursement of the IMF program and related multilateral lending should enable Ukraine to meet its external financing needs over the next year,” S&P analysts said in an e-mailed statement.

Now compare that with a real world report from July 17:

The IMF now expects Ukraine's economy to shrink by 6.5% this year, compared with 5% at the time the emergency loans were agreed. GDP stagnated last year.

Ukraine's government is spending more than expected on security as it battles the separatists. Having lost control of parts of the country, revenue collection is also falling behind schedule.

And state gas firm Naftogaz is struggling to force customers to pay their debts.

...
"The program hinges crucially on the assumption that the conflict will begin to subside in the coming months," the IMF said. "A significant prolongation of the crisis would seriously strain their ability to [reform the economy] without a substantial increase in external support on adequate terms."

The IMF more explicitly formulated: "Expect more of your money being wasted on the Nazis in Kiev."

Fortunately, after the rating disaster of mortgage bonds and derivatives that led to the financial crisis, smart real world investors have become mostly immune of the rating companies' nonsense, diminishing their influence further into the pure propaganda territory. From the last lines of first piece:

Global bond yields showed investors ignored 56 percent of Moody’s and 50 percent of S&P’s rating and outlook changes in 2012, more often disagreeing when the companies said governments were becoming safer or more risky, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

The S&P propaganda effort will therefore likely fail.

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2014/07/ukraine-financial-rating-propaganda-likely-to-fail.html