“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” This proverbial phrase is emblem-atic of the CRAs’ relationship with criticism and financial crises. Whether it be the global financial crisis of 2008, the subsequent European sovereign debt crisis, the earlier Enron, Parmalat and WorldCom scandals or the Asian financial crisis of 1997– 99, CRAs have demonstrated a puzzling resilience and crisis resistance. Their authority has proved to be immune to the public outrage generated by rating failures and to the harsh criticism of policy makers, practitioners and scholars of different ideological traditions and camps. Undoubtedly, their survival can be explained by the CRAs’ structural power and constitutive role in the financial system. But it has to be acknowledged that, in retrospect, the CRAs weathered the storm of criticism they faced extremely well. They were able to channel the accusations made against them productively, using them to their own advantage.

In the case of the Enron debacle, ratings were deemed to be insufficiently timely. CRAs responded by speeding up their information processing. In the wake of the GFC, CRAs indulged in a PR campaign after putting transparency measures in place to alleviate concerns about there being a fundamental transparency deficit in the industry – a view widely shared among practitioners, regulators, policy-makers and scholars. Embracing transparency, one of the much heralded values in financial market discourses, enabled the CRAs to signal that their epistemic authority was still intact. Conservative ratings in the wake of the Asian financial crisis and the European sovereign debt crisis have also been interpreted as the CRAs’ efforts to compensate for prior rating failures and to demonstrate their learning capacity. As a result of all these presumably strategic reactions to crises, CRAs succeeded in restoring their reputation and credibility.

The role of the CRAs in the GFC revived criticism, and the extent to which CRAs came under fire between 2008 and 2012 was unique. CRAs were scrutinized as never before – a fact demonstrated by the quantity of litera-ture about CRAs that emerged in the aftermath of the crisis. The criticism was multifaceted and related to different characteristics of the rating business, and it surfaced at different moments during the crisis.