The impact on Corporate Balance Sheets of the opinion espressed by rating Agencies

In early 2014 there was the news of the start of the criminal proceedings in the court of Trani, who sees as suspects those responsible for the rating agencies Standard & Poor's and Fitch, for the crime of market manipulation, compounded by the offensive nature and the very considerable extent of damage caused.This event prompted me to return to a topic covered in my article entitled The financial crisis and the empire of "evaluators", published in the Italian Journal of Accounting and Business Administration, n. 9 and 10/2011. The content of the study can be summarized as follows: since the beginning of the third millennium, there were two world crises in financial markets: it now appears that a third one is beginning. Underlying the phenomenon are the behaviors of key stakeholders investors, who assumed the role of short and very short term "speculators" . However, it has to be recognized, among the causes of the crisis, also the work of rating agencies, which sometimes have issued assessments, proved to be totally unreliable. This paper will also examine the possible effects of crisis on the economic and financial balance and, consequently, on the financial statement of companies, particularly referred to the Italian one.