The European Commission recently put forward a proposal for a regulation to amend and strengthen the 2009 version of the EU's rules on the regulation of credit rating agencies ("CRA3"). Among other things, Art. 35a of the draft proposal introduces strict liability for rating agencies. This...

Prologue : The perils of sleepwalking -- Contextualizing debt : history, morality, and the triple structural dimension -- The nature of sovereign creditworthiness : hierarchy, sovereignty, and responsibility -- Moralizing credit : bad debt, good debt, and the troubled conscience -- pt. I. Debt...

We study the relationship between bank lending standards, loan growth and the business cycle in the euro area and the US within a vector error correciton model using Bayesian estimation methods. To deal with the short data series available for the euro area, we exploit information from the...