Our progress is dented by eurozone weakness

Although the credit rating agencies have serious questions to answer about their role in the global economic and financial crisis that is now around five years old, their utterances still attract a lot of interest and are still very influential.

Consequently, what they say has to be taken seriously because they actually still exert considerable market influence over how investors regard countries and companies. After a prolonged period of consistently negative comment about Ireland, it was somewhat encouraging that one of them, Fitch, actually made some relatively positive comments about Ireland this week.

Fitch suggested Ireland’s recent successful debt issue has added to its positive credit momentum and improves the country’s chances of making a full return to the international bond markets later this year. Despite this, the agency is still somewhat concerned about Ireland due to the still large fiscal deficit and the threats posed by the intensification of the eurozone debt crisis. While Ireland is making solid progress, these are valid concerns, particularly the threat posed by the eurozone mess.