Credit rating agencies have been under the spotlight since the beginning of the current financial crisis. They failed in their assessment of US residential mortgage- based securities in the mid-2000s. Nevertheless, investors generally consider credit ratings useful to help form their views on...

Europe’s banking system has been in a state of systemic fragility since 2007-08. The current phase is marked by a sequence of interactions between sovereign problems and banking problems, resulting in gradual contagion to more countriesand more asset classes. The banking and sovereign crises...

Public authorities overseeing the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Foundation, through the Monitoring Board in place since early 2009, should encourage the Foundation to make itself more directly accountable to the global investment community. The Monitoring Board should...