MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Argentina minister blasts credit rating agencies for putting out “terrorist reports”

Lorenzino said Argentina on Wednesday will be paying the Bonar X dollar-bond for 200 million dollars

Argentine Economy Minister Hernán Lorenzino ratified Wednesday’s down payment of the “Bonar X” dollar-bond for 200 million dollars and blasted credit rating agencies which along with speculators “set terrorist reports in order to make some profit out of it.”

On his Twitter account, the minister wrote on Tuesday morning: “Tomorrow (Wednesday) we (national government) will be paying the Bonar X dollar-bond for 200 million dollars. Thus, we keep paying our debts.”

Likewise, the minister attacked international credit rating agency Moody’s that on Monday issued a negative outlook on the issue of bonds in Argentina after Chaco province paid dollar debts in pesos last week.

“We’d like to deny the statements issued by the credit rating agency since no regulations have been changed in the Argentine bonds market.”

Furthermore, Lorenzino remarked that “Once again, a speculative attack mounted by a credit rating agency and some media groups is directed to us when we are about to meet some debt payments.“

To end Lorenzino indicated that rating agencies walk along with international speculators by setting “terrorist reports” intended to frighten investors.

“Credit rating agencies = Speculators. They want to lower the bond price a day before the payment so they can make some profit out of it. An old pirate trick”, the minister also wrote in Twitter.

Last week in a similar attack Lorenzino questioned the ”credit rating agencies' behaviour“ and the tendentious use of their analysis to develop ”self fulfilling prophecies.“

The minister stated that ”the 2009 and current international financial crisis demonstrate the limitations of the analysis method the rating agencies apply.“

“Credit rating agencies were created to evaluate the debt payments independently but these evaluations have an impact in the debt value they are analyzing, generating negative process as ‘self fulfilling prophecies’”.

The minister took the cases of Argentina and Greece as an example, saying that “in 2009, Greece had the investment grade, before the big crisis, when the subprime. Its rating has been downgraded since 2009 intensifying the crisis.”

In the case of Argentina, he affirmed that “the process has been the other way round, for the last five years we've been rated as a country in a crisis with a high debt risk.”

“For the agencies, Argentina is constantly about to get into a crisis, but Argentina has grown for the last ten years and fulfils its financial obligations” he concluded.