Glen Newey

Those who hold up the Netherlands as a beacon of toleration often cite Amsterdam’s ganja speakeasies as evidence. Last weekend I took a (coach) trip there to see them. On the coach our Dutch chaperones are Brian and Edgar. Brian (his real name) has lived in Brussels for the past eighteen months. He reckons that Brussels, and Belgium generally, suck the chrome off a bumper. Why? Everything is better in the Netherlands. ‘Amsterdam is like New York. Brussels is like a village in Arizona. Public transport is shit. Everything is dirty. Wifi coverage is crap compared with Holland. Vegetables in the shops are squashy or too hard. And the bureaucracy...’ ‘Don’t tell me about the bureaucracy,’ I say, but he does anyway, with a credible saga about his problems getting a Belgian bank card. I ask him about the coffee shops.

A quarter century after the Mauerfall, much of Berlin is still a building site. Hoardings often enthuse ‘Wir bauen um!’ ('We're rebuilding!') to an inconvenienced public, as if construction projects were never simply means, but always ends in themselves.

As the saying goes, horses for courses – and now, if the Princess Royal gets her way, those courses will include not just Aintree or Newmarket, but first and main, possibly served with horseradish sauce or horse chestnuts. Princess Anne, as she used to be known before she was upgraded to Princess Royal as one in the eye for Diana, declared last week that horse should be on the menu again, notwithstanding the brouhaha earlier this year over horse meat. Times are hard: food is dear. So the proles can't afford Tesco value sausage? Let them eat horse.

France last week had its credit rating knocked down a tick from AA+ to AA by one of the ‘big three’ rating agencies. Standard & Poor’s blamed the French economy’s sluggish recovery, high unemployment and a high debt-GDP ratio. Credit ratings, whose rationale is to make risk assessments for investors, matter for governments and other bond issuers, since lower ratings mean higher borrowing costs, and downgraded bonds can tailspin as increased repayments up the likelihood of issuers’ defaulting. For governments, that means higher budget deficits, and calls for austerity to balance the books.

So credit ratings are big bananas. But what are credit rating agencies?