Abstract
“Assessing the Ability of a Financial System to Withstand Financial Stress” is an interesting and somewhat challenging topic for a rating agency professional such as myself, since this is similar to, but not exactly the same as, what we do at Moody’s. As you know, rating agencies publish opinions of the credit quality of securities and their issuers. My department, Moody’s Financial Institutions and Sovereign Risk Group, rates financial institutions, sovereigns, supranationals, and subsovereigns. We cover 2,000 issuers in 100 countries. The question that we attempt to answer about each of these issuers is, “How likely is a creditor of this obligor to get all of its money back on a timely basis?” In attempting to answer this question for banks and sovereigns, we are necessarily confronted with the need to analyze the soundness of financial systems as a whole. So it is not unreasonable to ask someone from a rating agency to address this topic.
International Monetary Fund Copyright © 2010-2021. All Rights Reserved.