Rate me up, before you go-go: Caveat Lector column

Rate me up, before you go-go

Japan: credit rating under scrutiny

Japan continues its slide down the slippery slope of the credit ratings world, and with it so perhaps does the credibility of the whole sovereign ratings process. Is Japan really a Aa2/AA-/AA- credit and, if so, is it really two notches weaker than Nestlé but one notch better than Unilever?

It was in the run-up to European currency union in October 1997 that BNP (it hadn’t bought Paribas from under the nose of Société Générale yet) gave a seminar for insurance companies on the prospects for a pan