Credit Ratings and Sovereign Debt : The Political Economy of Creditworthiness Through Risk and Uncertainty

Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. ment officials between July 2011 and November 2012. Apart from ESMA officials in Paris, virtually all of them were located in either Canary Wharf (London) or on Bay St (Toronto). Given the topic and timing, confidentiality was their preference; the notable exception being the Managing Director (Retired) of Sovereign Ratings (Moody's), David H. Levey. Nevertheless, I am grateful to all of them for their insights. Tim Shaw and Christina Brian at Palgrave Macmillan expressed enthusiasm for the project and helped to smooth the process. Finally, a very special thanks go to my parents, Barbara and Jack Paudyn. If it was not for their loving support throughout the years, this marvelous adventure would not have been possible. At the heart of the struggle to constitute the 'politics of limits' - the parameters defining the budgetary realities facing governments - is the growing antagonistic relationship between the imperatives of private (financial) markets and public democracies. Through a new analytical instrumentality, this interdisciplinary account problematizes credit ratings and the problem of sovereign debt to show how the authoritative knowledge underpinning the political economy of creditworthiness is constructed through the deployment of the discursive practices of risk and uncertainty. Unpacking the 'black-box' of sovereign ratings, as a socio-technical device of control and governmentality, we better understand how their authoritative capacity/utility are constituted through their performative effects, which create the conditions and subjectivities that serve to validate and regenerate a disinflationary fiscal normality/rectitude. Political judgment is censured through depoliticizing risk techniques; as a (fallacious) analytics of ratings helps elevate quantitative expertise and relegates competing, qualitative approaches in the design of a neoliberal politics of limits. This exacerbates the asymmetry between epistocracy and democracy, which prompts attempts to reclaim lost fiscal sovereignty (site de l'éditeur) Front Matter....Pages i-xi Introduction: Credit Rating Crisis....Pages 1-29 Crisis and Control....Pages 30-82 The Rise of Risk and Uncertainty....Pages 83-134 Rating Performativity....Pages 135-182 Epistocracy versus Democracy....Pages 183-202 Conclusion: Problematizing the Ratings Space....Pages 203-213 Back Matter....Pages 214-245 Bartholomew Paudyn investigates how governments across the globe struggle to constitute the authoritative knowledge underpinning the political economy of creditworthiness and what the (neoliberal) 'fiscal normality' means for democratic governance.