Abstract

This article aims to explain the growing role of auditing and rating agencies in contemporary financial markets. In particular, the paper tries to explain how these agencies work as trust diffusors and the consequences of manifest errors in auditing and rating. The main thesis is that the organizational complex of auditing and rating works as a powerful generator of systemic trust, especially in this phase of growing economic uncertainty. For this reason the principal-agent problem present in auditing and rating cannot be reduced to latent or manifest conflicts of interest because it involves a wider field of relations based on focalized and generalized institutional trust.