It is now clear that rating agencies’ models failed in the recent past as a result of wrongly basing their ratings on the correlations observed during good times. In my opinion, the recent methodological changes, imposing stricter rating caps (above the rating of the sovereign), in particular for EMU countries, amount to treating crisis times as structural changes making the new methodologies based again on extreme assumptions. Thus, the error is the same, this time in the opposite direction. Policy-makers timely acknowledged the fragilities in the design of the EMU, identifying the most crucial reforms needed. These will increase the robustness of the euro area economies against adverse shocks. Rating agencies do not fully recognize the ongoing process. Instead, they decide to change their procedures exactly at the moment in which the institutional framework of the EMU is responding to the very same conditions that motivated such move. In this regard, it is important to emphasize that EMU countries are about to be equipped with a banking union, which will contribute towards breaking the link between sovereigns and the banking/financial system. Further relevant institutional changes include the creation of the European stability mechanism, the Fiscal Compact, the new role of the ECB in eliminating runs on sovereign debt (through the Outright Monetary Transactions programme) and a comprehensive set of EU regulations aimed at avoiding fiscal and macroeconomic imbalances. Therefore, rating agencies are moving countercyclically with the EU institutional advances and risk becoming irrelevant.
This means there is a fiscal honeymoon in the first year of higher prices that creates the illusion for policymakers that there is additional room in the budget to spend. It is only during the next year or two as costs adjust and indexation mechanisms start to work that the painful reckoning comes due. Caution is therefore needed when any additional fiscal support measures are designed. Ongoing research at Eesti Pank has attempted to estimate the extent to which an unexpected rise in inflation would affect fiscal balances in the euro area using data from the mid-1990s to 2021, and has found that inflation has a sizeable positive effect on the fiscal balance as a percentage of GDP7. The positive effect comes both from the expenditure side of the budget and from the revenue side. This is particularly true when there is a significant positive inflation surprise, meaning when actual inflation turns out to be higher than expected. Governments in Europe increased their spending in 2022 so they could fund energy subsidies, invest in their defence forces and provide the help needed by Ukraine. Despite this extra spending though, the fiscal picture has remained relatively benign in most countries and in the euro area overall. This also applies to Estonia, where preliminary data suggest that the fiscal deficit for 2022 will be around 1.2 per cent of GDP. This benign outcome can in large part be ascribed to the high inflation that we saw last year.