AAA, BBB, BHV

Now that the threat from Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull ash cloud has suddenly evaporated, Europe has been engulfed by a fresh wave of panic over the impact on the euro of the chronic financial situation in Greece. And fears that Athens' inability to service its debts will result in a domino effect in other vulnerable eurozone countries - starting with Portugal and Spain - have been heightened by downgrades of their sovereign debt ratings.

The ratings, which are supposed to evaluate the capacity of states to pay their creditors, are attributed by three large agencies - Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch - who share an oligopolistic market. In case you were wondering, these are the same agencies that failed to predict the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States, the consequences of which are now all too familiar. They were also a little slow to realise what was going on in Greece, though some of the blame for this must be shared by Athens, which had cooked its books to comply with the parameters for the single currency.

Today, the ratings agencies are weighing heavily on European nerves: a simple downgrade in their assessment of the creditworthiness of one of the "PIGS" (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain) could result in the end of the euro. To maintain their ongoing level of apprehension, European readers have been invited to familiarise themselves with odd series of letters, which in the language of finance describe the level of risk for financial investors inherent in their countries' government bonds: AAA, AAB, BBB, BB+ and so on.

A final word of warning: these ratings are not to be confused with BHV, the acronym for Belgium's bilingual arrondissement of Bruxelles-Hal-Vilvorde, which is also enjoying a moment of glory in the media. At the end of last week, failure to reach agreement on the division of the borough - an issue that is the subject of major tension between Belgium's Flemish and Walloon communities - resulted in the fall of the government of Yves Leterme, which was supposed to assume the rotating presidency of the European Union in July.

Gian Paolo Accardo