Economy & Business - May 2009 (ISSN 1741-7430)

As the US credit rating agencies, Moody's, Standard Poor's and Fitch have learned to their cost in the past 12 months, judging credit is much more of an art than a science. Box ticking is no way to assess securities and risks that have years of life before them. Judging credit risk in Latin America has throughout history been a mug's game. Banks even managed to persuade themselves to believe that countries with more foreign currency liabilities than assets could not “go bust".