A few weeks ago, I started receiving a stream of message about an Instagram post that I was allegedly starring in, where after offering my views on Palantir's valuation, I was soliciting investors to invest with me (or with an investment entity that had ties to me). I was not surprised, since I have lived with imitations for years, but I was bemused, since I don't have an Instagram account and have not posted on Facebook more than once or twice in a decade. In the last few days, those warnings have been joined by others, who have noted that there is now a video that looks and sounds like me, adding to the sales pitch with promises of super-normal returns if they reach out, and presumably send their money in. (Please don't go looking for these scams online, since the very act of clicking on them can expose you to their reach.)     I would like to think that readers of my books or posts, or students in my classes, know me well enough to be able to tell that these are fakes, and while this is not the first time I have been targeted, it is clear that AI has upped the ante, in terms of creating posts and videos that look authentic. In response, I cycled through a series of emotions, starting with surprise that there are some out there who think that using my name alone will draw in investors, moving on to anger at the targeting of vulnerable investors and ending with frustration at the social media platforms that allow these fakes to exist. As a teacher, though, curiosity beat out all of these emotions, and I thought that the best thing that I can do, in addition to the fruitless exercise of notifying the social media companies about the fakes, is to talk about what these AI imitators got right, what they were off target on and what they got wrong in trying to create these fakes of me. Put simply, I plan to grade my AI imitator, as I would any student in my class, recognizing that being objective in this exercise will be tough to do. In the lead-in, though, I have to bore you with details of my professional life and thought process, since that is the key to creating a general framework that you will be able to use to detect AI imitations, since the game will only get more sophisticated in the years to come. An Easy Target?     In a post last year, I talked about a bot in my name, that was in development phase at NYU, and while officially sanctioned, it did open up existential challenges  for me. In discussing that bot, I noted that this bot had accessed everything that I had ever written, talked about or valued in my lifetime, and that I had facilitated its path by making that access easy. I will explain my rationale for the open access, and provide you with the links if you want to get to them, hoping to pre-empt those who will try to charge you for that content. My Open Access Policy     I have said this before, but there is no harm in saying it again, but I am a teacher, first and foremost, and almost every choice I make in my profession life reflects that mindset. A teacher, like an actor or singer, craves an audience, and the larger and more enthusiastic that audience, the better. When I started teaching in 1986, my audience was restricted to those in my physical classroom at NYU's business school, and my initial attempts at expanding that audience were very limited. I had video recorders set up to record my lectures, made three copies of each lecture tape, and put them on the shelves at NYU's library for patrons to check out and watch. The internet, for all of its sins, changed the game for me, allowing me to share not only class materials (slides, exams) but also my lecture videos, in online formats. Though my early attempts to make these conversions were primitive, the technology for recording classes and putting them online has made a quantum leap. In spring 2025, every one of my NYU classes was recorded by cameras that are built into classroom, the conversions to online videos happened in minutes, right after the class is done, and YouTube has been a game changer, in allowing access to anyone with an internet connection anywhere in the world.     As the internet has expanded its reach, and social media platforms have joined the mix, I have also shared the other components that go into my classes more widely, starting with the data on industry averages that I need and use in my own valuations, the spreadsheets that contain these valuations and blog posts on markets and companies and any other tools that I use in my own analyses. While I am happy to receive compliments for the sharing and praise for being unselfish, the truth is that my sharing is driven less by altruism (I am no Mother Theresa!) and more  by two other forces. The first is that, as I noted in my post on country equity risk premiums last week, there much of what I know or write about is pedestrian, and holding it in secret seems silly. The second is that, while I am not easily outraged, I am driven to outrage by business consultants and experts who state the obvious (replacing words you know with buzzwords and acronyms), while making outrageous claims of what they can deliver and charging their customers absurd amounts for their advice and appraisals. If I can save even a few of these customers from making these payments, I consider it to be a win. My Sharing Spots     Everything that I have ever written, worked on or taught is somewhere online, almost always with no protective shields (no passwords or subscriptions), and there are four places where you can find them: Webpage: The oldest platform for my content remains my webpage, damodaran.com, and while it can be creaky, and difficult to navigate, it contains the links to my writing, teaching, data, spreadsheets and other tools.  Teaching: I teach two classes at Stern, corporate finance and valuation, and have four other classes - a lead-into-valuation accounting class, a made-for-finance statistics class, a class on investment philosophies and one on corporate life cycles, and I described these classes in a post on teaching at the start of 2025. You can find them all by going to the teaching link on my webpage, https://people.stern.nyu.edu/adamodar/New_Home_Page/teaching.html including my regular classes (class material, lecture notes, exams and quizzes and webcasts of the classes) in real time, as well as archived versions from previous semesters. In addition, the online classes are at the same link, with material, post- class tests and webcasts of sessions for each class. This is also the place where you can find links to seminars that I teach in the rest of the world, with slides and materials that I used for those classes (though I have been tardy about updating these). Data: At the start of every year for the last three decades, I have shared my analysis of data on publicly traded companies, breaking down the data into corporate finance and valuation categories. This link, https://people.stern.nyu.edu/adamodar/New_Home_Page/data.html, will take you to the entry page, and you can then either access the most recent data (from the start of 2025, since I update only once a year, for most datasets) or archived data (from previous years). My raw data comes from a variety of sources, and in the interests of not stepping on the toes of my data providers, my data usually reflects industry averages, rather than company-specific data, but it does include regional breakdowns: US, Europe, Emerging Markets (with India and China broken out individually, Australia & Canada & New Zealand) and Japan.   Spreadsheets: I am not an Excel ninja, and while my spreadsheet-building skills are adequate, my capacity to make them look polished is limited. I do share the spreadsheets that I use in my classes and work here, with my most-used (by me) spreadsheet being one that I use to value most companies at this link, with a webcast explaining its usage. Books: I have written eleven books and co-edited one, spread out across corporate finance, valuation and investing, and you can find them all listed here. Many of these books are in their third or fourth editions, but with each one, you should find a webpage that contains supplementary material for that book or edition (slides, answers to questions at the end of each chapter, data, spreadsheets backing the examples). This is the only section of the spreadsheet where you may encounter a gatekeeper, asking you for a password, and only if you seek access to instructor material. If you are wondering what is behind the gate, it is only the powerpoint slides, with my notes on each slide, but the pdf versions of these slides should be somewhere on the same page, without need for a password. Papers: I don't much care much for academic research, but I do like to write about topics that interest or confound me, and you can find these papers at this link. My two most widely downloaded papers are updates I do each year on the equity risk premium (in March) and country risk premiums (in July). Much of the material in these papers has made its way into one or more of my books, and thus, if you find the books unaffordable, you can get that material here for free. Blog posts: I will confess that when I write my first blog post on September 17, 2008, I had no idea what a blog was, what I was doing with it, and whether it would last through the following week. In the years since, this blog has become my first go-to, when I have doubts or questions about something, and I am trying to resolve those doubts for myself. In short, my blog has becoming my therapy spot, in times of uncertainty, and I have had no qualms about admitting to these doubts. During 2020, as COVID made us question almost everything we know about markets and the economy, for instance, I posted on where I was in the uncertainty spectrum every week from February 14, 2020 (when the virus became a global problem, not one restricted to China and cruise ships) to November 2020, when the vaccine appeared. You can get all of those posts in one paper, if you click on this link. While my original blog was on Google, in the last two years, I have replicated these posts on Substack (you need to be a subscriber, but it is free) and on LinkedIn. If you are on the latter, you are welcome to follow me, but I have hit my connections limit (I did not even know there was one, until I hit it) and am unable to add connections. YouTube: For the last decade, I have posted my class videos on YouTube, grouping them into playlists for each class. You can start with the link to my YouTube channel here, but if you are interested in taking a class, my suggestion is that you click on the playlists and pick on the one that corresponds to the class. Here, for instance, are my links to my Spring 2025 MBA valuation class and my Spring 2025 Corporate Finance class. Starting about a decade, I have also accompanied every one of my blog posts with a YouTube video, that contains the same material, and you can find those posts in its own (very long) playlist.  X (Twitter): Some of you have strong feelings about X, with some of those feelings reflecting your political leanings and others driven by the sometimes toxic posting on the platform. I have been a user of the platform since April 2009, and I have used it as a bulletin board, to alert people to content being posted elsewhere. In fact, outside of these "alert" posts, I almost never post on X, and steer away as far away as I can from debates and discussions on the platform, since a version of Gresham's law seems to kick in, where the worst and least informed posters hijack the debate and take it in directions that you do not want it to go. I cannot think of a single item of content that I have produced in the last decade that is not on one of these platforms, making my professional life an open book, and thus also accessible to any AI entity. The Damodaran bot that I wrote about last year has access to all of this material, and while I signed off on that and one other variant, there are multiple unauthorized versions that have been works-in-progress.  The Commonalities     My content has taken many forms including posts, videos, data and spreadsheets, and is on multiple platforms, but there are a few common features that they share: Low tech: I am decidedly low tech, and it shows in my sharing. My website looks like it was designed two decades ago, because it was, and contains none of the bells and whistles that make for a modern website. My blog remains on Google blogger, notwithstanding everything I have been told about how using WordPress would make it more attractive/adaptable, and my posts are neither short nor punchy. Every week, I get people reaching out to me to tell me that my YouTube videos are far too long and verbose, and that I would get more people watching with shorter videos and catchier descriptions, and much as I appreciate their offers to help, I have not taken them up on it., In addition, I shoot almost every one of my videos in my office, sometimes with my dog in the background, and often with ambient noise and mistakes embedded, making them definitely unpolished.  On twitter, I have only recently taken to stringing tweets together and I have never used the long text version that some professional twitter users have mastered. In my defense, I could always claim that I am too old to learn new tricks, but the truth is that I did not start any of my sharing as a means to acquiring a larger social media following, and it may very well be true that keeping my presence low-tech operates as a screener, repelling mismatched users. Process over product: In my writing and teaching, I am often taken to task for not getting to the bottom line (Is the stock cheap or expensive? Should I buy or sell?) quickly, and spending so much time on the why and how, as opposed to the what. Much as my verbosity may frustrate you, it reflects what I think my job is as a teacher, which is to be transparent about process, i.e., explain how I reasoned my way to getting an answer than giving you my answer. Pragmatism over Purity: Though I am often criticized for being an “academic”, I am a terrible one, and if there were an academic fraternity, I would be shunned. I view much of an academic research as navel gazing, and almost everything I write and teach is for practitioners. Consequently, I am quick to adapt and modify models to make them fit both reality and the available data, and make assumptions that would make a purist blanch.  No stock picks or investment advice: In all my years of writing about and valuing markets and individual stocks, I have tried my best to steer away from making stock picks or offering investment advice. That may sound odd, since so much of what I do relates to valuation, and the essence of valuation is that you act on your estimates of value, but here is how I explain the contradiction. I value stocks (like Meta or Nvidia or Amazon or Mercado Libre) and I act (buy or sell) those stocks, based on my valuations, but it is neither my place nor my role to try to get other people to do the same. That said, I will share my story and valuation spreadsheet with you, and if you want to adapt that story/spreadsheet to make it your own, I am at peace with that choice, even if it is different from mine. The essence of good investing is taking ownership of your investment actions, and it is antithetical to that view of the world for me or anyone else to be telling you what to buy or sell. No commercial entanglements: If you do explore my content on any of the platforms it is available on, you will notice that they are free, both in terms of what you pay and how you access them. In fact, none of them are monetized, and if you do see ads on my YouTube videos, it is Google that is collecting the revenue, not me. One reason for this practice is that I am lazy, and monetizing any of these platforms requires jumping through hoops and catering to advertisers that I neither have the time nor the inclination to do. The other is that I believe (though this may be more hope than truth) that one of the reasons that people read what I write or listen to me is because, much as they may disagree with me, I am perceived as (relatively) unbiased. I fear that formalizing a link with any commercial entity (bank, consultant, investor), whether as advisor, consultant or as director, opens the door to the perception of bias. The one exception to the "no commercial entranglements' clause is for my teaching engagements, with the NYU Certificate program and for the handful of valuation seminars I teach in person in the rest of the world. I am grateful that NYU has allowed me to share my class recordings with the world, and I will not begrudge them whatever they make on my certificate classes, though I do offer the same content for free online, on my webpage. I am also indebted to the people and organizations that manage the logistics of my seminars in the rest of the world, and if I can make their life easier by posting about these seminars, I will do so.     The Imitation Game     Given that my end game in sharing is to give access to people who want to use my material, I have generally taken a lax view of others borrowing my slides, data, spreadsheets or even webcasts, for their own purposes. For the most part, I categorize this borrowing as good neighbor sharing, where just as I would lend a neighbor a key cooking ingredient to save them the trouble of a trip to the grocery store, I am at peace with someone using my material to help in their teaching, save time on a valuation or a corporate finance project, prepare for an interview, or even burnish their credentials. An acknowledgement, when this happens, is much appreciated, but I don't take it personally when none is forthcoming.  There are less benign copycat versions of the imitation game - selectively using data from my site to back up arguments, misreading or misinterpreting what I have said and reproducing large portions of my writing without acknowledgement. To be honest, if made aware of these transgressions, I have gently nudged the culprits, but I don't have a legal hammer to follow up. The most malignant variations of this game are scams, where the scammers use my content or name to separate people from their money - the education companies that used my YouTube videos and charge for classes, the data sites that copy my data or spreadsheets and sell them to people, and the valuation/investment sites that try to get people to invest money, with my name as a draw. Until now, I have tried, as best as I can, to let people know that they are being victimized, but for the most part, these scams have been so badly designed that they have tended to collapse under the weight of their own contradictions. It is clear to me that AI is now going to change this game, and that I will have to think about new ways to counter its insidious reach. To get a measure of what the current AI scams that are making the rounds get right and wrong, I did take the time to take a closer look at both the Instagram post and the fake video that are making the rounds.  What they get right: The Instagram post, which is in shown below, uses language that clearly is drawn from my posts and an image that is clearly mine. Not only does this post reflect the way I write, but it also picked Nvidia and  Palantir as the two firms to highlight,  the first a company that I own and have valued on my blog, and the second a company that I have been talking about as one that I am interested in owning, at the right price, giving it a patina of authenticity. The video looks and sounds like me, which should be no surprise since it had thousands of hours of YouTube videos to use as raw data. Using a yiddish word that I picked up in my days in New York, I have the give the scammers credit for chutzpah, on this front,, but I will take a notch off the grade, for the video's slickness, since my videos have much more of a homemade feel to them. What they struggled with most: The scam does mention that Palantir is "overhyped", a word that I use rarely, and while it talks about the company’s valuation, it is cagey about what that value is and there is little of substance to back up the claim. Palantir is a fascinating company, but to value it, you need a story of a data/software firm, with two channels for value creation, one of which looks at the government as a customer (a lower-margin, stickier and lower growth business) and the other at its commercial market (higher margin, more volatile and higher growth). Each of the stories has shades of grey, with the potential for overlap and conflict, but this is not a company where you can extrapolate the past, slap numbers on revenue growth and profitability, and arrive at a value. This post not only does not provide any tangible backing for its words in terms of value, but it does not even try. If these scammers had truly wanted to pull this off, they could have made their AI bot take my class, construct a plausible Palantir story, put it into my valuation spreadsheet and provide it as a link.  What they get wrong: To get a sense of what this post gets wrong, you should revisit the earlier part of the post where I talk about my sharing philosophy, and with as much distance as I can muster, here are the false notes in this scam. First, this scam pushes people to join an investment club, where I will presumably guide them on what to buy or sell. Given that my view of clubs is very much that of Groucho Marx, which is that I would not be belong to any club which would admit me as a member, the notion of telling people which stocks to buy cuts against every grain of my being. Second, there is a part of this scam where I purportedly promise investors who decide to partake that they will generate returns of 60% or higher, and as someone who has chronicled that not only do most active investors not keep up with the market, and argued that anyone who promises to deliver substantially more than the market in the long term is either a liar or fraud, this is clearly not me.  In sum, there is good news and bad news in this grading assessment. The good news is that this AI scam gets my language and look right, but it is sloppily done in terms of content and capturing who I am as a person. The bad news is that it if this scammer was less lazy and more willing to put in some work, even with the current state of AI, it would have been easy to bring up the grades on content and message. I will wager that the Damodaran Bot that I mentioned earlier on in this post that is being developed at NYU Stern would have created a post that would have been much more difficult for you to detect as fake, making it a Frankenstein monster perhaps in the making. The worse news is that AI technology is evolving, and it will get better on every one of these fronts at imitating others, and you should prepare yourself for a deluge of investment scams. An AI Protective Shield     I did think long about writing this post, wondering whether it would make a difference. After all, if you are a frequent reader of this blog or have read this post all the way down to this point, it is unlikely that you were fooled by the Instagram post or video. It remains an uncomfortable truth that the people most exposed to these scams are the ones who have read little or none of what I have written, and I wish there were a way that I could pass on the following suggestions on how they can protect themselves against the other fakes and scams that will undoubtedly be directed at them.  "Looks & sounds like" not good enough: Having seen the flood of fake AI videos in the news and on social media, I hope that you have concluded that “looks and sounds Iike” is no longer good enough to meet the authenticity test. This remains AI’s strongest suit, especially in the hands of the garden variety scammer, and you should prepare yourself for more fake videos, with political figures, investing luminaries and experts targeted. Steer away from arrogance & hype: I have always been skeptical of the notion that there is “smart” money, composed of investors who know more than the rest of us and are able to beat the market consistently, and for long periods. For the most part, when you see a group of investors (hedge funds, private equity) beating the market, luck is more of a contributor as skill, and success is fleeting. In a talk on the topic, I argued that investors should steer away from arrogance and bombast, and towards humility, when it comes to who they trust with their money, and that applies in spades in the world of AI scams. Since most scammers don’t understand the subtlety of this idea, screening investment sales pitches for outlandish claims alone will eliminate most scams. Do your homework: If you decide to invest with someone, based upon a virtual meet or sales pitch, you should do your homework and that goes well beyond asking for their track records in terms of performance. In my class on investment philosophies, I talk about how great investors through the ages have had very different views of markets and ways of making money, but each one has had an investment philosophy that is unique, consistent and well thought through. It is malpractice to invest with anyone, no matter what their reputation for earning high returns, without understanding that person’s investment philosophy, and this understanding will also give you a template for spotting fakes using that person’s name.  Avoid ROMO & FOMO: In my investing classes, I talk about the damage that ROMO (regret over missing out) and FOMO (fear of missing out) can do to investor psyches and portfolio.  With ROMO (regret over missing out), where you look back in time and regret not buying Facebook at its IPO price in 2012 or selling your bitcoin in  November 2013, when it hit $1000, you expose yourself to two emotions. The first is jealousy, especially at those who did buy Facebook at its IPO or have held on to their bitcoin to see its price hit six digits. The second is that you start buying into conspiracy theories, where you convince yourself that these winners (at least in the rear view mirror) were able to win, because the game was fixed in their favor. Both make you susceptible to chasing after past winners, and easy prey for vendors of conspiracies. With FOMO (fear of missing out), your overwhelming concern is that you will miss the next big multi-bagger, an investment that will increase five or ten fold over the next year or two. The emotion that is triggered is greed, leading you to overreach in your investing, cycling through your investments, as most of them fall short of your unrealistic expectations, and searching for the next “big thing”, making you susceptible to anyone offering a pathway to get there. Much as we think of scammers as the criminals and the scammed as the victims, the truth is that scams are more akin to tangos, where each side needs the other. The scammer’s techniques work because they trigger the emotions (fear, greed) of the scammed, to respond, and AI will only make this easier to do. Looking to regulators or the government to protection will do little more than offer false comfort, and the best defense is “caveat emptor” or “buyer beware”.  YouTube Video Links Webpage: https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/home.htm  Blog:  (1) Google: https://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com  (2) Substack: https://aswathdamodaran.substack.com  (3) LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aswathdamodaran/  YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLvnJL8htRR1T9cbSccaoVw X: https://x.com/aswathdamodaran?lang=en

At the start of July, I updated my estimates of equity risk premiums for countries, in an semiannual ritual that goes back almost three decades. As with some of my other data updates, I have mixed feelings about publishing these numbers. On the one hand, I have no qualms about sharing these estimates, which I use when I value companies, because there is no secret sauce or special insight embedded in them. On the other, I worry about people using these premiums in their valuations, without understanding the choices and assumptions that I had to make to get to them. Country risk, in particular, has many components to it, and while you have to ultimately capture them in numbers, I wanted to use this post to draw attention to the many layers of risk that separate countries. I hope, and especially if you are a user of my risk premiums, that you read this post, and if you do have the time and the stomach, a more detailed and much longer update that I write every year. Country Risk - Dimensions     When assessing business risk from operating in a country, you will be affected by uncertainty that arises from almost every source, with concerns about political structure (democracies have very different risk profiles than authoritarian regimes), exposure to violence (affecting both costs and revenues),  corruption (which operates an implicit tax) and legal systems (enforcing ownership rights) all playing out in business risk. I will start with political structure, where the facile answer is that it less risky to operate a business in a democracy than in an authoritarian regime, but where the often unpalatable truth is that each structure brings its own risks. With democracies, the risk is that newly elected governments can revisit, modify or discard policies that a previous government have adopted, requiring businesses to adapt and change to continuous changes in policy. In contrast, an authoritarian government can provide long term policy continuity, with the catch being that changes in the government, though infrequent, can create wrenching policy shifts that businesses have to learn to live with. Keeping the contrast between the continuous risk of operating in a democracy and the discontinuous risk in an authoritarian structure in mind, take a look at this picture of how the world looked in terms of democracy leading into 2025: Source: Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) It is worth noting that there are judgment calls that the Economist made in measuring democracy that you and I might disagree with, but not only is a large proportion of the world under authoritarian rule, but the trend lines on this dimension  also have been towards more authoritarianism in the last decade.         On the second dimension, exposure to violence, the effects on business are manifold. In addition to the threat that violence can affect operations, its presence shows up as higher operating costs (providing security for employees and factories) and as insurance costs (if the risks can be insured). To measure exposure to violence, from both internal and external sources, I draw on measures developed and updated by the Institute of  Economics & Peace across countries in 2024: Institute of Economics & Peace The Russia-Ukraine war has caused risk to flare up in the surrounding states and the Middle East and central Africa continue to be risk cauldrons, but at least according to the Institute's measures, the parts of the world that are least exposed to violence are in Northern Europe, Australia and Canada. Again, there are judgments that are made in computing these scores that will lead you to disagree with specific country measures (according the Peace Institute, the United States and Brazil have higher exposures to violence than Argentina and Chile, and India has more exposure to violence than China), but the bottom line is that there are significant differences in exposure to violence across the world.          Corruption is a concern for everyone, but for businesses, it manifests in two ways. First, it puts more honest business operators at a disadvantage in a corrupt environment, since they are less willing to break the rules and go along with corrupt practices than their less scrupulous competitors. Second, even for those businesses that are willing to play the corruption game, it creates costs that I would liken to an implicit tax that reduces profits, cash flows and value. The measure of corruption that I use comes from Transparency International, and leading into July 2025, and the heat map below captures corruption scores (with higher scores indicating less corruption), as well as the ten most and least corrupt countries in the world:  Transparency International As you can see from the map, there are vast swaths of the world where businesses have to deal with corruption in almost every aspect of business, and while some may attribute this to cultural factors, I have long argued that corruption almost inevitably follows in bureaucratic settings, where you need licenses and approvals for even the most trivial of actions, and the bureaucrats (who make the licensing decisions) are paid a pittance relative to the businesses that they regulate.           As a final component, I look at legal systems, especially when it comes to enforcing contractual agreements and property rights, central to running successful businesses. Here, I used estimates from the IPRI, a non-profit institution that measures the quality of legal systems around the world. In their latest rankings from 2024, here is how countries measured up in 2024: Property Rights Alliance In making these assessments, you have to consider not just the laws in place but also the timeliness with which these laws get enforced, since a legal system where justice is delayed for years or even decades is almost as bad as one that is capricious and biased.  Country Risk - Measures     The simplest and most longstanding measure of country risk takes the form of sovereign ratings, with the same agencies that rate companies (S&P, Moody's and Fitch) also rating countries, with the ratings ranging from Aaa (safest) to D (in default). The number of countries with sovereign ratings available on them has surged in the last few decades; Moody’s rated 13 countries in 1985, but that number increased to 143 in 2025, with the figure below listing the number of rated countries over time: Note that that the number of Aaa rated countries stayed at eleven, even while more countries were rated, and has dropped from fifteen just a decade ago, with the UK and France losing their Aaa ratings during that period. In May 2025, Moody's downgraded the United States, bringing them in line with the other ratings agencies; S&P downgraded the US in 2011 and Fitch in 2023. The heat map below captures sovereign ratings across the world in July 2025: Moody's While sovereign ratings are useful risk measures, they do come with caveats. First, their focus on default risk can lead them to be misleading measures of overall country risk, especially in countries that have political risk issues but not much default risk; the Middle East, for instance, has high sovereign ratings. Second, the ratings agencies have blind spots, and some have critiqued these agencies for overrating European countries and underrating Asian, African and Latin American countries. Third, ratings agencies are often slow to react to events on the ground, and ratings changes, when they do occur, often lag changes in default risk.     If you are leery about trusting ratings agencies, I understand your distrust, and there is an alternative measure of sovereign default risk, at least for about half of all countries, and that is the sovereign credit default swap (CDS) market, which investors can buy protection against country default. These market-determined numbers will reflect events on the ground almost instantaneously, albeit with more volatility than ratings. At the end of June 2025, there were about 80 countries with sovereign CDS available on them, and the figure below captures the values: The sovereign CDS spreads are more timely, but as with all market-set numbers, they are subject to mood and momentum swings, and I find using them in conjunction with ratings gives me a better sense of sovereign default risk.     If default risk seems like to provide too narrow a focus on countr risk, you can consider using country risk scores, which at least in principle, incorporate other components of country risk. There are many services that estimate country risk scores, including the Economist and the World Bank, but I have long used Political Risk Services (PRS) for my scores.. The PRS country risk scores go from low to high, with the low scores indicative of more country risk, and the table below captures the world (at least according to PRS): Political Risk Services (PRS) There are some puzzling numbers here,  with the United States coming in as riskier than Vietnam and Libya, but that is one reason why country risk scores have never acquired traction. They vary across services, often reflecting judgments and choices made by each service, and there is no easy way to convert these scores into usable numbers in business and valuation or compare them across services.      Country Risk - Equity Risk Premiums     My interest in country risk stems almost entirely from my work in corporate finance and valuation, since this risk finds its way into the costs of equity and capital that are critical ingredients in both disciplines. To estimate the cost of equity for an investment in a risky country. I will not claim that the approaches I use to compute equity risk premiums for countries are either original or brilliant, but they do have the benefit of consistency, since I have used them every year (with an update at the start of the year and mid-year) since the 1990s.      The process starts with my estimate of the implied equity risk premium for the S&P 500, and I make this choice not for parochial reasons but because getting the raw data that you need for the implied equity risk premium is easiest to get for the S&P 500, the most widely tracked index in the world. In particular, the process requires data on dividends and stock buybacks on the stocks in the index, as well as expected growth in these cash flows over time, and involves finding the discount rate (internal rate of return) that makes the present value of cash flows equal to the level of the index. On June 30, 2025, this assessment generated an expected return of 8.45% for the index: Download ERP spreadsheet Until May 2025, I just subtracted the US 10-year treasury bond rate from this expected return, to get to an implied equity risk premium for the index, with the rationale that the US T.Bond rate is the riskfree rate in US dollars. The Moody’s downgrade of the US from Aaa to Aa1 has thrown a wrench into the process, since it implies that the T.Bond rate has some default risk associated with it, and thus incorporates a default spread. To remove that risk, I net out the default spread associated with Aa1 rating from the treasury rate to arrive at a riskfree rate in dollars and an equity risk premium based on that: Riskfree rate in US dollars       = T.Bond rate minus Default Spread for Aa1 rating                                                             = 4.24% - 0.27% = 3.97% Implied equity risk premium for US = Expected return on S&P 500 minus US $ riskfree rate                                                             = 8.45% - 3.97% = 4.48% Note that this approach to estimating equity risk premiums is model agnostic and reflects what investors are demanding in the market, rather than making a judgment on whether the premium is right or what it should be (which I leave to market timers).        To get the equity risk premiums for other countries, I need a base premium for a mature market, i.e., one that has no additional country risk, and here again, the US downgrade has thrown a twist into the process. Rather than use the US equity risk premium as my estimate of the mature market premium, my practice in every update through the start of 2025, I adjusted that premium (4.48%) down to take out the US default spread (0.27%), to arrive at the mature market premium of 4.21%. That then becomes the equity risk premium for the eleven countries that continue to have Aaa ratings, but for all other countries, I estimate default spreads based upon their sovereign ratings. As a final adjustment, I scale these default spreads upwards to incorporate the higher risk of equities, and these become the country risk premiums, which when added to the mature market premium, yields equity risk premiums by country. The process is described below: Download spreadsheet The results from following this process are captured in the picture below, where I create both a heat map based on the equity risk premiums, and report on the ratings, country risk premiums and equity risk premiums, by country: Download equity risk premium, by country If you compare the equity risk premium heat map with the heat maps on the other dimensions of country risk (political and legal structures, exposure to violence and corruption), you will notice the congruence. The parts of the world that are most exposed to corruption and violence, and have capricious legal systems, tend to have higher equity risk premiums. The effects of the US ratings downgrade also manifest in the table, with the US now having a higher equity risk premium than its Aaa counterparts in Northern Europe, Australia and Canada. A User's Guide      My estimates of equity risk premiums, by country, are available for download, and I am flattered that there are analysts that have found use for these number. One reason may be that they are free, but I do have concerns sometimes that they are misused, and the fault is mine for not clarifying how they should be used. In this section, I will lay out steps in using these equity risk premiums in corporate finance and valuation practice, and  if I have still left areas of  grey, please let me know. Step 1: Start with an understanding of what the equity risk premium measures     The starting point for most finance classes is with the recognition that investors are collectively risk averse, and will demand higher expected returns on investments with more risk. The equity risk premium is a measure of the “extra” return that investors need to make, over and above the riskfree rate, to compensate for the higher risk that they are exposed to, on equities collectively. In the context of country risk, it implies that investments in riskier countries will need to earn higher returns to beat benchmarks than in safer countries. Using the numbers from July 2025, this would imply that investors need to earn 7.46% more than the riskfree rate to invest in an average-risk investment in India, and 10.87% more than the riskfree rate to invest in an average risk investment in Turkey.     It is also worth recognizing how equity risk premiums play out investing and valuation. Increasing the equity risk premium will raise the rate of return you need to make on an investment, and by doing so, reduce its value. That is why equity risk premiums and stock prices move inversely, with the ERP rising as stock prices drop (all other thins being held constant) and falling as stock prices increase.  Step 2: Pick your currency of analysis (and estimate a riskfree rate)     I start my discussions of currency in valuation by positing that currency is a choice, and that not only can you assess any project or value any company in any currency, but also that your assessment of project worth or company value should not be affected by that choice. Defining the equity risk premium as the extra return that investors need to make, over and above the risk free rate, may leave you puzzled about what riskfree rate to use, and while the easy answer is that it should be the riskfree rate in the currency you chose to do the analysis in, it is worth emphasizing that this riskfree rate is not always the government bond rate, and especially so, if the government does not have Aaa rating and faces default risk. In that case, you will need to adjust the government bond rate (just as I did with the US dollar) for the default spread, to prevent double counting risk.   Staying with the example of an Indian investment, the expected return on an average-risk investment in Indian rupees would be computed as follows: Indian government bond rate on July 1, 2025 = 6.32% Default spread for India, based on rating on July 1, 2025 = 2.16% Indian rupee risk free rate on July 1, 2025 = 6.32% - 2.16% = 4.16% ERP for India on July 1, 2025 = 7.46% Expected return on average Indian equity in rupees on July 1, 2025 = 4.16% + 7..46% = 11.62% Note also that if using the Indian government bond rate as the riskfree rate in rupees, you would effectively be double counting Indian country risk, once in the government bond rate and once again in the equity risk premium.     I know that the ERP is in dollar terms, and adding it to a rupee riskfree rate may seem inconsistent, but it will work well for riskfree rates that are reasonably close to the US dollar risk free rate. For currencies, like the Brazilian real or Turkish lira, it is more prudent to do your calculations entirely in US dollars, and convert using the differential inflation rate: US dollar riskfree rate on July 1, 2025 = 3.97% ERP for Turkey on July 1, 2025 = 10.87% Expected return on average Turkish equity in US $ on July 1, 2025 = 3.97% + 10.87% = 14.84% Expected inflation rate in US dollars = 2.5%; Expected inflation rate in Turkish lira = 20% Expected return on average Turkish equity Turkish lira on July 1, 2025 = 1.1484 *(1.20/1.025) -1 = 34.45% Note that this process scales up the equity risk premium to a higher number for high-inflation currencies. Step 3: Estimate the equity risk premium or premiums that come into play based on operations    Many analysts use the equity risk premiums for a country when valuing companies that are incorporated in that country, but I think that is too narrow a perspective. In my view, the exposure to country risk comes from where a company operates, not where it is incorporated, opening the door for bringing in country risk from emerging markets into the cost of equity for multinationals that may be incorporated in mature markets. I use revenue weights, based on geography, for most companies, but I am open to using production weights, for natural resource companies, and even a mix of the two.  In corporate finance, where you need equity risk premiums to estimate costs of equity and capital in project assessment, the location of the project will determine which country’s equity risk premiums come into play. When Amazon decides to invest in a Brazilian online retail project, it is the equity risk premium for Brazil that should be incorporated, with the choice of currency for analysis determining the riskfree rate.  Step 4: Estimate project-specific or company-specific risk measures and costs     The riskfree rate and equity-risk premiums are market-wide numbers, driven by macro forces. To complete this process, you need two company-specific numbers: Not all companies or projects are average risk, for equity investors in them, and for companies that are riskier or safer than average, you need a measure of this relative risk. At the risk of provoking those who may be triggered by portfolio theory or the CAPM, the beta is one such measure, but as I have argued elsewhere, I am completely at home with alternative measures of relative equity risk. The cost of equity is calculated as follows:  Cost of equity = Riskfree rate + Beta × Equity Risk Premium The beta (relative risk measure) measures the risk of the business that the company/project is in, and for a diversified investor, captures only risk that cannot be diversified away. While we are often taught to use regressions against market indices to get these betas, using industry-average or bottom-up betas yields much better estimates for projects and companies. For the cost of debt, you need to estimate the default spread that the company will face. If the company has a bond rating, you can use this rating to estimate the default spread, and if it is not, you can use the company's financials to assess a synthetic rating. Cost of debt =Riskfree Rate + Default spread Harking back to the discussion of riskfree rates, a company in a country with sovereign default risk will often bear a double burden, carrying default spreads for both itself and the country. The currency choice made in step two will hold, with the riskfree rate in both the cost of equity and debt being the long-term default free rate in that currency (and not always the government bond rate). Step 5: Ensure that your cash flows are currency consistent      The currency choice made in step 2 determines not only the discount rates that you will be using but also the expected cash flows, with expected inflation driving both inputs. Thus, if you analyze a Turkish project in lira, where the expected inflation rate is 20%, you should expect to see costs of equity and capital that exceed 25%, but you should also see growth rates in the cash flows to be inflated the same expected inflation. If you assess the same project in Euros, where the expected inflation is 2%, you should expect to see much lower discount rates, high county risk notwithstanding, but the expected growth in cash flows will also be muted, because of the low inflation.     There is nothing in this process that is original or path-breaking, but it does yield a systematic and consistent process for estimating discount rates, the D in DCF. It works for me, because I am a pragmatist, with a valuation mission to complete, but you should feel free to adapt and modify it to meet your concerns.  YouTube Video Paper Country Risk Determinants: Determinants, Measures and Implications - The 2025 Edition Datasets Equity Risk Premiums, by country - July 2025 Country Risk Links EIU Democracy Index Global Peace Index (Exposure to Violence) Corruption Index International Property Rights Index Moody's Sovereign Ratings Political Risk Services (PRS) Country Risk Scores Spreadsheets Implied Equity Risk Premium for S&P 500 on July 1, 2025

It is true that most investing lessons are directed at those who invest only in stocks and bonds, and mostly with long-only strategies. It is also true that in the process, we are ignoring vast swaths of the investment universe, from other asset classes (real estate, collectibles, cryptos) to private holdings (VC, PE) to strategies that short stocks or use derivatives (hedge funds). These ignored investment classes are what fall under the rubric of alternative investments, and while many of these choices have been with us for as long as we have had financial markets, they were accessible to only a small subset of investors for much of that period. In the last two decades, alternative investments have entered the mainstream, first with choices directed at institutional investors, but more recently, in offerings for individual investors. Without giving too much away, the sales pitch for adding alternative investments to a portfolio composed primarily of stocks and bonds is that the melding will create a better risk-return tradeoff, with higher returns for any given risk level, albeit with two different rationales. The first is that they have low correlations with financial assets (stocks and bonds), allowing for diversification benefits and the second is investments in some of these alternative asset groupings have the potential to earn excess returns or alphas. While the sales pitch has worked, at least at the institutional level, in getting buy-in on adding alternative investments, the net benefits from doing so have been modest at best and negative at worst, raising questions about whether there need to be more guardrails on getting individual investors into the alternative asset universe. The Alternative Investment Universe     The use of the word "alternative" in the alternative investing pitch is premised on the belief that much of investing advice is aimed at long-only investors allocating their portfolios between traded stocks, bonds and cash (close to riskless and liquid investments). In that standard investment model, investors choose a stock-bond mix, for investing, and use cash as a buffer to bring in not only liquidity needs and risk preferences, but also views on stock and bond markets (being over or under priced): The mix of stocks and bonds is determined both by risk preferences, with more risk taking associated with a higher allocation to stocks, and market timing playing into more invested in stocks (if stocks are viewed as under priced) or more into bonds (if stocks are over priced and bond are viewed as neutral investments).      This framework accommodates a range of choices, from the purely mechanical (like the much touted 60% stocks/40% bonds mix) to more flexible, where allocations can vary across time and be a function of market conditions. This general framework allows for variants, including different view on markets (from those who believe that markets are efficient to stock pickers and market timers) as well as investors with very different time horizons and risk levels. However, there are clearly large segments of investing that are left out of this mix from private businesses (since they are not listed and traded) to short selling (where you can have negative portfolio weights not just on individual investments but on entire markets) to asset classes that are not traded. In fact, the best way to structure the alternative investing universe if by looking at alternatives through the lens of these missing pieces. 1. Long-Short    In principle, there is little difference between being long on an investment and holding a short position, with the only real difference being in the sequencing of cash flows, with the former requiring a negative cash flow at the time of the action (buying the stock or an asset) and a positive cash flow in a subsequent period (when it is sold), and the latter reversing the process, with the positive cash flow occurring initially (when you sell a stock or an asset that you do not own yet) and the negative cash flow later. That said, they represent actions that you would take with diametrically opposite views of the same stock (asset), with being long (going short) making sense on assets where you expect prices to go up (down). In practice, though, regulators and a subset of investors seem to view short selling more negatively, often not just attaching loaded terms like "speculation" to describe it, but also adding restrictions of how and when it can be done.     Many institutional investors, including most mutual, pension and endowment funds, are restricted from taking short positions on investments, with exceptions sometimes carved out for hedging. For close to a century, at least in the United States, hedge funds have been given the freedom to short assets, and while they do not always use that power to benefit, it is undeniable that having that power allows them to create return distributions (in terms of expected returns, volatility and other distributional parameters) that are different from those faced by long-only investors. Within the hedge fund universe, there are diverse strategies that not only augment long-only strategies (value, growth) but also invest across multiple markets (stocks, bonds and convertibles) and geographies.     The opening up of derivatives markets has allowed some investors to create investment positions and or structured products that use options, futures, swaps and forwards to create cash flow and return profiles that diverge from stock and bond market returns.  2. Public-Private     While much of our attention is spent on publicly traded stocks and bonds, there is a large segment of the economy that is composed of private businesses that are not listed or traded. In fact, there are economies, especially in emerging markets, where the bulk of economic activity occurs in the private business space, with only a small subset of businesses meeting the public listing/trading threshold. Many of these private businesses are owned and funded by their owners, but a significant proportion do need outside equity capital, and historically, there have been two providers: For young private businesses, and especially those that aspire to become bigger and eventually go public, it is venture capital that fills the void, covering the spectrum from angel financing for idea businesses to growth capital for firms further along in their evolution. From its beginnings in the 1950s, venture capital has grown bigger and carries more heft, especially as technology companies have come to dominate the market in the twenty first century. For more established private businesses, some of which need capital to grow and some of which have owners who want to cash out, the capital has come from private equity investors. Again, while private equity has been part of markets for a century or more, it has become more formalized and spread its reach in the last four decades, with the capacity to raise tens of billions of dollars to back up deal making. On the debt front, the public debt and bank debt market is supplemented by private credit,  where investors pool funds to lend to private businesses, with negotiated rates and terms. again a process that has been around a while, but one that has also become formalized and a much larger source of funds. Advocates for private credit investing argue that it can be value-adding partly because of the borrower composition (often cut off from other sources of credit, either because of their size or default history) and partly because private credit providers can be more discerning of true default risk. Even as venture capital, private equity and private credit have expanded as capital sources, they remained out of reach for both institutional and individual investors until a couple of decades ago, but are now integral parts of the alternative investing universe. 3. Asset classes     Public equity and debt, at least in the United States, cover a wide spectrum of the economy, and by extension, multiple asset classes and businesses, but there are big investment classes that are either underrepresented in public markets or missing. Real estate: For much of the twentieth century, real estate remained outside the purview of public markets, with a segmented investor base and illiquid investments, requiring localized knowledge. That started to change with the creation of real estate investment trusts, which securitized a small segment of the market, creating liquidity and standardized units for public market investors. The securitization process gained stream in the 1980s with the advent of mortgage-backed securities. Thus, real estate now has a presence in public markets, but that presence is far smaller than it should be, given the value of real estate in the economy. Collectibles: The collectible asset class spans an array of investment, most of which generate little or no cash flows, but derive their pricing from scarcity and enduring demand. The first and perhaps the longest standing collectible is gold, a draw for investors during inflationary period or when they lose faith in fiat currencies and governments. The second is art, ranging from paintings from the masters to digital art (non-fungible tokens or NFTs), that presumably offers owners not just financial returns but emotional dividends. At the risk of raising the ire of crypto-enthusiasts, I would argue that much of the crypto space (and especially bitcoin) also fall into this grouping, with a combination of scarcity and trading demand determining pricing.  Institutional and individual investors have dabbled with adding these asset classes to their portfolios, but the lack of liquidity and standardization and the need for expert assessments (especially on fine art) have limited those attempts. The Sales Pitch for Alternatives     The strongest pitch for adding alternative investments to a portfolio dominated by publicly traded stocks and bonds comes from a basic building block for portfolio theory, which is that adding investments that have low correlation to the existing holdings in a portfolio can create better risk/return tradeoffs for investors. That pitch has been supplemented in the last two decades with arguments that alternative investments also offer a greater chance of finding market mistakes and inefficiencies, partly because they are more likely to persist in these markets, and partly because of superior management skills on the part of alternative investment managers, particularly hedge funds and private equity. The Correlation Argument     Much of portfolio theory as we know it is built on the insight that combining two investments that are not perfectly correlated with each other can yield mixes that deliver higher returns for any given level of risk than holding either of the investments individually. That argument has both a statistical basis, with the covariance between the two investments operating as the mechanism for the risk reduction, and an economic basis that the idiosyncratic movements in each investment can offset to create a less risky combination.      In that vein, the argument for adding alternative investments to a portfolio composed primarily of stocks and bonds rests on a correlation matrix of stocks and bonds with alternative investments (hedge funds, private equity, private credit, fine art, gold and collectibles): Guggenheim Investments While the correlations in this matrix are non-stationary (with the numbers changing both with time periods used and the indices that stand in for the asset classes) and have a variety of measurement issues that I will highlight later in this post, it is undeniable that they at least offer a chance of diversification that may not be available in a long-only stock/bond portfolio.     Using historical correlations as the basis, advocates for alternative investments are able to create portfolios, at least on paper, that beat stock/bond combinations on a risk/return tradeoff, as can be see in this graph: EquityMultiple Investment Partners, Green Street Advisors, and JPMorgan Asset Management Note that the comparison is to a portfolio composed 60% of stocks and 40% of bonds, a widely used mix among portfolio managers, and in each of the cases, adding alternative investments to that portfolio results in a mix that yields  higher returns with lower risk. The Alternative Alpha Argument     The correlation-based argument for adding alternative investments to a portfolio is neither new nor controversial, since it is built on core portfolio theory arguments for diversification. For some advocates of alternative investments, though, that captures only a portion of the advantage of adding alternative investments. They argue that the investment classes from alternative investments draw on, which include non-traded real estate, collectibles and private businesses (young and old), are also the classes where market mistakes are more likely to persist, because of their illiquidity and opacity, and that alternative asset managers have the localized knowledge and intellectual capacity to find and take advantage of these mistakes. The payoff from doing so takes the form of "excess returns" which will supplement the benefits that flow from just diversification.     This alpha argument is often heard most frequently with those advocating for adding hedge funds, venture capital and private equity to conventional portfolios, where the perception of superior investment management persists, but is that perception backed up by the numbers? In the graph below, I reproduce a study that looks at looked at 20-year annualized returns, from 2003 to 2022, on many alternative asset classes: Opto Insights Given the differences in risk across alternative investment classes, the median returns themselves do not tell us much about whether they earn excess returns, but two facts come through nevertheless. The first is that the variation across managers within investment classes is significant in both private equity and venture capital. The second, and this is not visible in this graph, is that persistence in outperformance is more common in venture capital and private equity than it is in public market investors, with winners more likely to continue winning and losers dropping out. I expanded on some of the reasons for this persistence, at least in venture capital, in a post from some years ago.    The bottom line is that there is some basis for the argument that as investment classes, hedge funds, private equity and venture capital, generate excess returns, albeit modest, relative to other investors, but it is unclear whether these excess returns are just compensation for the illiquidity and opacity that go with the investments that they have to make. In addition, given the skewed payoffs, where there are a few big and persistent winners, the median hedge fund, private equity investor or venture capitalist may be no better at generating alpha than the average mutual fund manager. The Rise of Alternative Investing     No matter what you think of the alternative investing sales pitch, it is undeniable that it has worked, at least at the institutional investor level, for some of its adopted, especially in the last two decades. In the graph below, for instance, you can track the rise of alternative investments in pension fund holdings in this graph (from KKR): Source: KKR That move towards alternatives is not just restricted to pension funds, as other allcators have joined the mix: Source: KKR Some of the early movers into alternative asset classes were lauded and used as role models by others in the space. David Swensen, at Yale, for instance, burnished a well-deserved reputation as a pioneer in investment management by moving Yale's endowment into private equity and hedge funds earlier than other Ivy League schools, allowing Yale to outpace them in the returns race for much of this century: As other fund managers have followed Yale into the space, that surge has been good for private equity and hedge fund managers, who have seen their ranks grow (both in terms of numbers and dollar value under management) over time. Where's the beef?     As funds have increased their allocations to alternative investments, drawn by the perceived gains on paper and the success of early adopters, it is becoming increasingly clear that the results from the move have been underwhelming. In short, the actual effects on returns and risk from adding alternative investments to portfolios are not matching up to the promise, leading to questions of why and where the leakage is occurring.   The Questionable Benefits of Alternative Investing     In theory and principle, adding investments from groupings of investments that are less correlated with stocks and bonds should yield benefits for investors, and at least in the aggregate, over long time periods that may hold. Cambridge Associates, in their annual review of endowments, presents this graph of returns and standard deviations, as a function of how much each endowment allocated to private investments over a ten-year period (from 2012-2022): Cambridge Associates With the subset of endowments that Cambridge examined, both annual returns and Sharpe ratios  were higher at funds that invested more in private investments (which incorporates much of the alternative investment space). Those results, though, have been challenged by others looking at a broader group of funds. In an article in CFA magazine, Nicolas Rabener looked at the two arguments for adding hedge funds to a portfolio, i.e., that they increase Sharpe ratios and reduce drawdowns in fund value during market downturns, and found both absent in practice: Nicolas Ramener, CFA Institute With hedge funds, admittedly just one component of alternative investing, Rabener finds that notwithstanding the low correlations that some hedge fund strategies have with a conventional equity/bond portfolio, there is no noticeable improvement in Sharpe ratios or decrease in drawdowns from adding them to the portfolio.     Richard Ennis, a long-time critic of alternative investing, has a series of papers that question the benefits to funds from adding them to the mix.  Richard Ennis, SSRN In the Ennis sample, the excess returns become more negative as the allocation to alternative investments is increased, undercutting a key sales pitch for the allocation. While alternative investing advocates will take issue with the Ennis findings, on empirical and statistical bases, even long-term beneficiaries from alternative investing seem to have become more skeptical about its benefits over time. In a 2018 paper, Fragkiskos, Ryan and Markov noted that among Ivy League endowments, properly adjusting for risk causes any benefits in terms of Sharpe ratios, from adding alternative investments to the mix, to disappear. In perhaps the most telling sign that the bloom is off the alternative investing rose, Yale's endowment announced its intent to sell of billions of dollars of private equity holdings in June 2025, after years of under performance on its holdings in that investment class. Correlations: Real and Perceived     At the start of this post, I noted that a key sales pitch for alternative investments is their low correlation with stock/bond markets, and to the extent that this historical correlations seem to back this pitch, it may be surprising that the actual results don't measure up to what is promised. There are two reasons why these historical correlations may be understated for most  private investment classes: Pricing lags; Unlike publicly traded equities and bonds, where there are observable market prices from current transactions, most private assets are not liquid and the pricing is based upon appraisals. In theory, these appraisers are supposed to mark-to-market, but in practice, the pricing that they attach to private assets lag market changes. Thus, when markets are going up or down quickly, private equity and venture capital can look like they are going up or down less than public equity markets, but that is because of the lagged prices.  Market crises: While correlations between investment classes are often based upon long periods, and across up and down markets, the truth is that investors care most about risk (and correlations) during market crises, and many investment classes that exhibit low correlation during sideways or stable markets can have lose that feature and move in lock step with public markets during crisis. That was the case during the banking crisis in the last quarter of 2008 and during the COVID meltdown in the first quarter of 2020, when funds with large private investment allocations felt the same drawdown and pain as funds without that exposure. In my view, this understatement of correlation is most acute in private equity and venture capital, which are after all equity investments in businesses, albeit private, instead of public. It is less likely to be the case for truly differentiated investment classes, such as gold, collectibles and real estate, but even here, correlations with public markets have risen, as they have become more widely held by funds. With hedge funds, it is possible to construct strategies that should have lower correlation with public markets, but some of these strategies can have catastrophic breakdowns (with the potential for wipeout) during market crises. Illiquidity and Opacity (lack of transparency)     Even the strongest advocates for alternative investments accept that they are less liquid than public market investments, but argue that for investors with long time horizons and clearly defined cash flow needs (like pension and endowment funds), that illiquidity should not be a deal breaker. The problem with this argument is that much as investors like to believe that they control their time horizons and cash needs, they do not, and find their need for liquidity rising during acute market crises or panics. The other problem with illiquidity is that it manifests in transactions costs, manifesting both in terms of bid-ask spreads and in price impact that drains from returns.     The other aspect of the private investment market that is mentioned but then glossed over is that many of its vehicles tend to be opaque in terms of governance structure and reporting. Investors, including many large institutional players, that invest in hedge funds, private equity and venture capital are often on the outside looking in, as deals get structured and gains get apportioned. Again, that absence of transparency may be ignored in good times, but could make bad times worse. Disappearing Alphas     When alternative investing first became accessible to institutional investors, the presumption was that market-beating opportunities abounded in private markets, and that hedge fund, private equity and venture capital managers brought superior abilities to the investment game. That may have been true then, but that perception has faded for many reasons. First, as the number of funds and money under management in these investment vehicles has increased, the capacity to make easy money has also faded, and in my view, the average venture capital, private equity or hedge fund manager is now no better or worse than the average mutual fund manager. Second, the investment game has also become more difficult to win, as the investment world has become flatter, with many of the advantages that fund managers used to extract excess returns dissipating over time. Third, the entry of passive investment vehicles like exchange traded funds (ETFS) that can spot and replicate active investors who are beating the market has meant that excess returns, even if present, do not last for long.     With hedge funds, the fading of excess returns over time has been chronicled. Sullivan looked at hedge funds between 1994 and 2019 and noted that even by 2009, the alpha had dropped to zero or below: Sullivan, Hedge fund alpha: Cycle or Sunset In a companion paper, Sullivan also noted another phenomenon undercutting the benefits of adding hedge funds to a public market portfolio, which is that correlations between hedge fund returns and public market returns have risen over time from 0.65 in the 1990s to 0.87 in the last decade.     With private investment funds, the results are similar, when performance is compared over time. A paper looking at private equity returns over time concluded that private equity returns, which ran well above public market returns between 1998 and 2007, have started to resemble public market returns in most recent years. Ilmanen, Chandra and McQuinn The positive notes in both hedge funds and private equity, as we noted in an earlier section on venture capital, is that while the typical manager in each group has converged to the average, the best managers in these groups have shown more staying power than in public markets. Put simple, the hope is that you can invest your money with these superior managers, and ride their success to earn more than you would have earned elsewhere, but there is a catch even with that scenario, which we will explore next. The Cost Effect    Let's assume that even with fading alphas and higher correlations with public markets, some hedge funds and private market investors still provide benefits to funds invested primarily in public markets. Those benefits, though, still come with significant costs, since the managers of these alternative investment vehicles charge far more for their services than their equivalents in public markets. In general, the fees for alternative investments are composed of a management fee, specified as a percent of assets under management, and a performance fee, where the alternative investment manager gets a percent of returns earned over and above a specified benchmark. In the two-and-twenty model that many hedge and PE fund models used to adhere to, the fund managers collect 2% of the assets under management and 20% of returns in excess of the benchmark. Both numbers have been under downward pressure in recent years, as alternative investing has spread: Even with the decline, though, these costs represent a significant drag on performance, and  the chances of gaining a net benefit from adding an alternative investing class to a fund drop towards zero very quickly. An Epitaph for Alternative Investing?     It is clear, looking at the trend lines, that the days of easy money for those selling alternative investments as well as those buying these investments have wound down. Even  savvy institutional investors, who have been long-term believers in the benefits of alternative investing, are questioning whether private equity, hedge funds and venture capital have become too big and are too costly to be value-adding. As institutional investors become less willing to jump into the alternative investing fray, it looks like individual investors are now being targeted for the alternative investing sales pitch, and as with all things investing, I would suggest that buyer beware, and that investors, institutions and individual, keep the following in mind, when listening to alternative investing pitches: Be picky about alternatives: Given that the alpha pitch (that hedge fund and private equity managers deliver excess returns) has lost its heft, it is correlations that should guide investor choices on alternative investments. That will reduce the attractiveness of private equity and venture capital, as investment vehicles, and increase the draw of some hedge funds, gold and many collectibles. As for cryptos, the jury is still out, since bitcoin, the highest profile component, has behaved more like risky equity, rising and falling with the market, than a traditional collectible. Avoid high-cost and exotic vehicles: Investing is a tough enough game to win, without costs, and adding high cost vehicles makes it even more difficult. At the risk of drawing the ire of some, I would argue that any endowment or pension fund managers who pay two-and-twenty to a hedge fund, no matter how great its track record, first needs their heads examined and then summarily fired. On a related noted, alternative investments that are based upon strategies that are so complex that neither the seller nor buyer has an intuitive sense of what exactly they are trying to do should be avoided. Be realistic about time horizon and liquidity needs: As noted many times through this post, alternative investing, no matter how well structured and practiced, will come with less liquidity and transparency than public investing, making it a better choice for investors with longer time horizons and well-specified cash needs. On this front, individual investors need to be honest with themselves about how susceptible they are to panic attacks and peer-group pressure, and institutional investors have to recognize that their time horizons are determined by their clients, and not by their own preferences. Be wary of correlation matrices and historical alphas: The alternative investing sales pitch is juiced by correlation matrices (indicating that the alternative investing vehicle in question does not move with public markets) and historic alphas (showing that vehicle delivering market beating risk/return tradeoffs and Sharpe ratios). If there is one takeaway from this post, I hope that it is that historical correlations, especially when you have non-traded investments at play, are untrustworthy and that alphas fade over time, and more so when the vehicles that delivered them are sold relentlessly. YouTube video

I was on a family vacation in August 2011 when I received an email from a journalist asking me what I thought about the S&P ratings downgrade for the US. Since I stay blissfully unaware of most news stories and things related to markets when I am on the beach, I had to look up what he was talking about, and it was S&P's decision to downgrade the United States, which had always enjoyed AAA, the highest sovereign rating  that can be granted to a country, to AA+, reflecting their concerns about both the fiscal challenges faced by the country, with mounting trade and budget deficits, as well as the willingness of its political institutions to flirt with the possibility of default. For more than a decade, S&P remained the outlier, but in 2023, Fitch joined it by also downgrading the US from AAA to AA+, citing the same reasons. That left Moody's, the third of the major sovereign ratings agencies, as the only one that persisted with a Aaa (Moody's equivalent of AAA) for the US, but that changed on May 16, 2025, when it too downgraded the US from Aaa (negative) to Aa1 (stable). Since the ratings downgrade happened after close of trading on a Friday, there was concern that markets would wake up on the following  Monday (May 19) to a wave of selling, and while that did not materialize, the rest of the week was a down week for both stocks and US treasury bonds, especially at the longest end of the maturity spectrum. Rather than rehash the arguments about US debt and political dysfunction, which I am sure that you had read elsewhere, I thought I would take this moment to talk about sovereign default risk, how ratings agencies rate sovereigns, the biases and errors in sovereign ratings and their predictive power, and use that discussion as a launching pad to talk about how the US ratings downgrade will affect equity and bond valuations not just in the US, but around the world. Sovereign Defaults: A History     Through time, governments have often been dependent on debt to finance themselves, some in the local currency and much in a foreign currency. A large proportion of sovereign defaults have occurred with foreign currency sovereign borrowing, as the borrowing country finds itself short of the foreign currency to meet its obligations. However, those defaults, and especially so in recent years, have been supplemented by countries that have chosen to default on local currency borrowings. I use the word "chosen" because most countries  have the capacity to avoid default on local currency debt, being able to print money in that currency to pay off debt, but chose not to do so, because they feared the consequences of the inflation that would follow more than the consequences of default. BoC/BoE Sovereign Default Database While the number of sovereign defaults has ebbed and flowed over time, there are two points worth making about the data. The first is that, over time, sovereign defaults, especially on foreign currency debt, have shifted from bank debt to sovereign bonds, with three times as many sovereign defaults on bonds than on bank loans in 2023. The second is that local currency defaults are persistent over time, and while less frequent than foreign currency defaults, remain a significant proportion of total defaults.     The consequences of sovereign default have been both economic and political. Besides the obvious implication that lenders to that government lose some or a great deal of what is owed to them, there are other consequences. Researchers who have examined the aftermath of default have come to the following conclusions about the short-term and long-term effects of defaulting on debt: Default has a negative impact on the economy, with real GDP dropping between 0.5% and 2%, but the bulk of the decline is in the first year after the default and seems to be short lived. Default does affect a country’s long-term sovereign rating and borrowing costs. One study of credit ratings in 1995 found that the ratings for countries that had defaulted at least once since 1970 were one to two notches lower than otherwise similar countries that had not defaulted. In the same vein, defaulting countries have borrowing costs that are about 0.5 to 1% higher than countries that have not defaulted. Here again, though, the effects of default dissipate over time. Sovereign default can cause trade retaliation. One study indicates a drop of 8% in bilateral trade after default, with the effects lasting for up to 15 years, and another one that uses industry level data finds that export-oriented industries are particularly hurt by sovereign default. Sovereign default can make banking systems more fragile. A study of 149 countries between 1975 and 2000 indicates that the probability of a banking crisis is 14% in countries that have defaulted, an eleven percentage-point increase over non-defaulting countries. Sovereign default also increases the likelihood of political change. While none of the studies focus on defaults per se, there are several that have examined the after-effects of sharp devaluations, which often accompany default. A study of devaluations between 1971 and 2003 finds a 45% increase in the probability of change in the top leader (prime minister or president) in the country and a 64% increase in the probability of change in the finance executive (minister of finance or head of central bank). In summary, default is costly, and countries do not (and should not) take the possibility of default lightly. Default is particularly expensive when it leads to banking crises and currency devaluations; the former has a longstanding impact on the capacity of firms to fund their investments whereas the latter create political and institutional instability that lasts for long periods. Sovereign Ratings: Measures and Process     Since few of us have the resources or the time to dedicate to understanding small and unfamiliar countries, it is no surprise that third parties have stepped into the breach, with their assessments of sovereign default risk. Of these third-party assessors, bond ratings agencies came in with the biggest advantages: They have been assessing default risk in corporations for a hundred years or more and presumably can transfer some of their skills to assessing sovereign risk. Bond investors who are familiar with the ratings measures, from investing in corporate bonds, find it easy to extend their use to assessing sovereign bonds. Thus, a AAA rated country is viewed as close to riskless whereas a C rated country is very risky.  Moody’s, Standard and Poor’s and Fitch’s have been rating corporate bond offerings since the early part of the twentieth century. Moody’s has been rating corporate bonds since 1919 and started rating government bonds in the 1920s, when that market was an active one. By 1929, Moody’s provided ratings for almost fifty central governments. With the Great Depression and the Second World War, investments in government bonds abated and with it, the interest in government bond ratings. In the 1970s, the business picked up again slowly. As recently as the early 1980s, only about thirteen  governments, mostly in developed and mature markets, had ratings, with most of them commanding the highest level (Aaa). The decade from 1985 to 1994 added 34 countries to the sovereign rating list, with many of them having speculative or lower ratings and by 2024, Moody's alone was rating 143 countries, covering 75% of all emerging market countries and almost every developed market.  table.tableizer-table { font-size: 12px; border: 1px solid #CCC; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; } .tableizer-table td { padding: 4px; margin: 3px; border: 1px solid #CCC; } .tableizer-table th { background-color: #104E8B; color: #FFF; font-weight: bold; } Not only have ratings agencies become more active in adding countries to their ratings list, but they have also expanded their coverage of countries with more default risk/ lower ratings.  In fact, the number of Aaa rated countries was the same in 1985, when there were thirteen rated countries, as in 2025, when there were 143 rated countries. In the last two decades, at least five sovereigns, including Japan, the UK, France and now the US, have lost their Aaa ratings.  In addition to more countries being rated, the ratings themselves have become richer. Moody’s and S&P now provide two ratings for each country – a local currency rating (for domestic currency debt/ bonds) and a foreign currency rating (for government borrowings in a foreign currency).      In assessing these sovereign ratings, ratings agencies draw on a multitude of data, quantitative and qualitative. Moody's describes its sovereign ratings process in the picture below: The process is broad enough to cover both political and economic factors, while preserving wiggle room for the ratings agencies to make subjective judgments on default that can lead to different ratings for two countries with similar economic and political profiles. The heat map below provides the sovereign ratings, from Moody's, for all rated countries the start of 2025: Moody's sovereign ratings Note that the greyed out countries are unrated, with Russia being the most significant example; the ratings agencies withdrew their rating for Russia in 2022 and not reinstated it yet. There were only a handful of Aaa rated countries, concentrated in North America (United States and Canada), Northern Europe (Germany, Scandinavia), Australia & New Zealand and Singapore (the only Aaa-rated Asian country. In 2025, there have been a eight sovereign ratings changes, four upgrades and four downgrades, with the US downgrade from Aaa to Aa1 as the highest profile change With the US downgrade, the list of Aaa-rated countries has become shorter, and as Canada and Germany struggle with budget imbalances, the likelihood is that more companies will drop off the list. Sovereign Ratings:  Performance and Alternatives     If sovereign ratings are designed to measure exposure to default risk, how well do they do? The answer depends on how you evaluate their performance. The ratings agencies provide tables that list defaults by rating that back the proposition that sovereign ratings and default are highly correlated. A Moody's update of default rates by sovereign ratings classes, between 1983 and 2024, yielded the following: Default rates rise as sovereign ratings decline, with a default rate of 24% for  speculative grade sovereign debt (Baa2 and below) as opposed to 1.8% for investment grade (Aaa to Baa1) sovereign debt.     That said, there are aspects of sovereign ratings that should give pause to anyone considering using them as their proxy for sovereign default, they do come with caveats and limitations: Ratings are upward biased: Ratings agencies have been accused by some of being far too optimistic in their assessments of both corporate and sovereign ratings. While the conflict of interest of having issuers pay for the rating is offered as the rationale for the upward bias in corporate ratings, that argument does not hold up when it comes to sovereign ratings, since not only are the revenues small, relative to reputation loss, but a proportion of sovereigns are rated for no fees. There is herd behavior: When one ratings agency lowers or raises a sovereign rating, other ratings agencies seem to follow suit. This herd behavior reduces the value of having three separate ratings agencies, since their assessments of sovereign risk are no longer independent. Too little, too late: To price sovereign bonds (or set interest rates on sovereign loans), investors (banks) need assessments of default risk that are updated and timely. It has long been argued that ratings agencies take too long to change ratings, and that these changes happen too late to protect investors from a crisis. Vicious Cycle: Once a market is in crisis, there is the perception that ratings agencies sometimes overreact and lower ratings too much, thus creating a feedback effect that makes the crisis worse. This is especially true for small countries that are mostly dependent on foreign capital for their funds. Regional biases: There are many, especially in Asia and Latin America, that believe that the ratings agencies are too lax in assessing default risk for North America and Europe,  overrating countries in  those regions, while being too stringent in their assessments of default in Asia, Latin America and Africa, underrating countries in those regions.  In sum, the evidence suggests that while sovereign ratings are good measures of country default risk, changes in ratings often lag changes on the ground, making them less useful to lenders and investors.     If the key limitation of sovereign ratings is that they are not timely assessors of country default risk, that failure is alleviated by the development of the sovereign CDS market, a market where investors can buy insurance against country default risk by paying an (annualized) price. While that market still has issues in terms of counterparty risk and legal questions about what comprises default, it has expanded in the last two decades, and at the start of 2025, there were about 80 countries with sovereign CDS available on them. The heat map below provides a picture of sovereign (10-year)  CDS spreads on January 1, 2025: As you can see, even at the start of 2025, the market was drawing a distinction between  the safest Aaa-rated countries (Scandinavia, Switzerland, Australia and New Zealand), all with sovereign CDS spreads of 0.20% or below, and more risky Aaa-rated countries (US, Germany, Canada). During 2025, the market shocks from tariff and trade wars have had an effect, with sovereign CDS spreads increasing, especially in April. The US, which started 2025 with a sovereign CDS spread of 0.41%, saw a widening of the spread to 0.62% in late April, before dropping back a bit in May, with the Moody's downgrade having almost no effect on the US sovereign CDS spread. The US Downgrade: Lead-in and Aftermath     With that background on sovereign default and ratings, let's take a look at the story of the moment, which is the Moody's downgrade of the US from Aaa to Aa1. In the weeks since, we have not seen a major upheaval in markets, and the question that we face as investors and analysts is whether anything of consequence has changed as a result of the downgrade. The Lead-in     As I noted at the start of this post, Moody's was the last of the big three sovereign ratings agencies giving the United States a Aaa rating, with S&P (in 2011) and Fitch (in 2023) having already downgraded the US. In fact, the two reasons that both ratings agencies provided at the time of their downgrades were rising government debt and politically dysfunction were also the reasons that Moody's noted in their downgrade. On the debt front, one of the measures that ratings agencies use to assess a country's financial standing is its debt to GDP ratio, and it is undeniable that this statistic has trended upwards for the United States: The ramping up of US debt since 2008 is reflected in total federal debt rising from 80% of GDP in 2008  to more than 120% in 2024. While some of the surge in debt can be attributed to the exigencies caused by crises (the 2008 banking crisis and the 2020 COVID bailouts), the troubling truth is that the debt has outlasted the crises and blaming the crises for the debt levels today is disingenuous.      The problem with the debt-to-GDP measure of sovereign fiscal standing is that it is an imperfect indicator, as can be seen in this list of countries that scored highest and lowest on this measure in 2023: IMF Many of the countries with the highest debt to GDP ratios would be classified as safe and some have Aaa ratings, whereas very few of the countries on the lowest debt to GDP list would qualify as safe. Even if it it the high debt to GDP ratio for the US that triggered the Moody's downgrade, the question is why Moody's chose to do this in 2025 rather than a year or two or even a decade ago, and the answer to that lies, I think, in the political component. A sovereign default has both economic and political roots, since a government that is intent on preserving its credit standing will often find ways to pay its debt and avoid default. For decades now, the US has enjoyed special status with markets and institutions (like ratings agencies), built as much on its institutional stability (legal and regulatory) as it was on its economic power. The Moody's downgrade seems to me a signal that those days might be winding down, and that the United States, like the rest of the world, will face more accountability for lack of discipline in its fiscal and monetary policy. Market Reaction     The ratings downgrade was after close of trading on Friday, May 16, and there was concern about how it would play out in markets, when they opened on Monday, May 19. US equities were actually up on that day, though they lost ground in the subsequent days: If equity markets were relatively unscathed in the two weeks after the downgrade, what about bond markets, and specially, the US treasury market? After all, an issuer downgrade for any bond is bad news, and rates should be expected to rise to reflect higher default risk: While rates did go up in the the first few days after the downgrade, the effect was muddled by the passage of a reconciliation bill in the house that potentially could add to the deficit in future years. In fact, by the May 29, 2025, almost all of the downgrade effect had faded, with rates close to where they were at the start of the year.     You may be surprised that markets did not react more negatively to the ratings downgrade, but I am not for three reasons: Lack of surprise effect: While the timing of the Moody's downgrade was unexpected, the downgrade itself was not surprising for two reasons. First, since S&P and Fitch had already downgraded the US, Moody's was the outlier in giving the US a Aaa rating, and it was only a matter of time before it joined the other two agencies. Second, in addition to reporting a sovereign rating, Moody's discloses when it puts a country on a watch for a ratings changes, with positive (negative) indicating the possibility of a ratings upgrade (downgrade). Moody's changed its outlook for the US to negative in November 2023, and while the rating remained unchanged until May 2025, it was clearly considering the downgrade in the months leading up to it. Magnitude of private capital: The immediate effect of a sovereign ratings downgrade is on government borrowing, and while the US does borrow vast amounts, private capital (in the form of equity and debt) is a far bigger source of financing and funding for the economy.  Ratings change: The ratings downgrade ws more of a blow to pride than to finances, since the default risk (and default spread) difference between an Aaa rating and a Aa1 rating is small. Austria and Finland, for instance, had Aa1 ratings in May 2025, and their ten-year bonds, denominated in Euros, traded at a spread of about 0.15- 0.20% over the German ten-year Euro bond; Germany had a Aaa rating. Consequences for valuation and investment analysis    While the immediate economic and financial consequences of a downgrade from Aaa to Aa1 will be small, there are implications for analysts around the world. In particular, analysts will have to take steps when working with US dollars that they may already be taking already when working with most other currencies in estimating basic inputs into financial analysis.     Let's start with the riskfree rate, a basic building block for estimating costs of equity and capital, which are inputs into intrinsic valuation. In principle, the riskfree rate is what you will earn on a guaranteed investment in a currency, and any risk premiums, either for investing in equity (equity risk premium) or in fixed income securities (default spreads), are added to the riskfree rate. It is standard practice in many textbooks and classrooms to use the government bond rate as the risk free rate, but that is built on the presumption that governments cannot default (at least on bonds issued in the local currency). Using a Aaa (AAA) rating as a (lazy) proxy for default-free, that is the rationale we used to justify government bond rates as riskfree rates at the start of 2025, in Australian, Singapore and Canadian dollars, the Euro (Germany). Swiss francs and Danish krone. As we noted in the first section, the assumption that governments don't default  is violated in practice, since some countries choose to default on local currency bonds, rather than face up to inflation. If that is the case, the government bond rate is no longer truly a riskfree rate, and getting to a riskfree rate will require netting out a default spread from the government bond rate: Risk free rate = Government Bond rate − Default spread for the government  The default spread can be estimated either from the sovereign bond rating (with a look up table) or a sovereign CDS spread, and we used that process to get riskfree in rates in a  host of currencies, where local currency government bonds had default risk, at the start of 2025: Thus, to get a riskfree rate in Indian rupees, Brazilian reals or Turkish lira, we start with government bonds in these currencies and net out the default spreads for the countries in question. We do this to ensure that we don't double count country risk by first using the government bond (which includes default risk) as a riskfree rate and then using a larger equity risk premium to allow for the same country risk.       Now that the US is no longer Aaa rated, we have to follow a similar process to get a riskfree rate in US dollars: US 10-year treasury bond rate on May 30, 2025  = 4.41% Default spread based on Aa1 rating on May 30, 2025  = 0.40% Riskfree rate in US dollars on May 30, 2025 = US 10-year treasury rate - Aa1 default spread = 4.41% - 0.40% = 4.01% This adjustment yields a riskfree rate of 4.01% in US dollars, and it is also built on the presumption that the default spread manifested after the Moody's downgrade on May 16, when the more realistic reading is that US treasury markets have been carrying a  default spread embedded in them for years, and that we are not making it explicit.     The ratings downgrade for the US will also affect the equity risk premium computations that I use to estimate the cost of equity for companies. As some of you who track my equity risk premiums by country know, I estimate an equity risk premium for the S&P 500, and at least until the start of this year, I used that as a premium for all mature markets (with a AAA (Aaa) rating as the indicator of maturity). Thus, countries like Canada, Germany, Australia and Singapore were all assigned the same premium as that attributed to the S&P 500. For countries with ratings below Aaa, I added an "extra country risk premium"  computed based upon the default spreads that went with the country ratings: With the ratings downgrade, I will have to modify this process in three ways. The first is that when computing the equity risk premium for the S& P 500, I will have to net out the adjusted riskfree rate in US dollars rather than the US treasury rate, yielding a higher equity risk premium for the US. Second, for Aaa rated countries, to the extent that they are safer than the US will have to be assigned an equity risk premium lower than the US, with the adjustment downward reflecting the Aa1 rating for the US. The third is that for all other countries, the country risk premium will be computed based upon the the their default spreads and the equity risk premium estimated for Aaa rated countries (rather than the US equity risk premium): How will the cost of equity for a firm with all of its revenues in the United States be affected as a consequence? Let's take three companies, one below-average risk, one average-risk and one above average risk, and compute their costs of equity on May 30, 2025, with and without the downgrade favored in: As you can see, the expected return on the S&P 500 as of May 30, 2025, reflecting the index level then and the expected cash flows, is 8.64%. Incorporating the effects of the downgrade changes the composition of that expected return, resulting in a lower riskfree rate (4.01% instead of 4.41%) and a higher equity risk premium (4.63% instead of 4.23%). Thus, while the expected return for the average stock remains at 8.64%, the expected return increases slightly for riskier stocks and decreases slightly for safer stocks, but the effects are so small that investors will hardly notice. If there is a lesson for analysts here, it is that the downgrade's effects on the discount rates (costs of equity and capital) are minimal, and that staying with the conventional approach (of using the ten-year US treasury bond rate as the riskfree rate and using that rate to compute the equity risk premium) will continue to work. Conclusion     The Moody's ratings downgrade of the US made the news, and much was made of it during the weekend that followed. The financial and economic consequences, at least so far, have been inconsequential, with equity and bond markets shrugging off the downgrade, perhaps because the surprise factor was minimal. The downgrade also has had only a minimal impact on costs of equity and capital for US companies, and while that may change, the changes will come from macroeconomic news or from crises. For the most part, analysts should be able to continue to work with the US treasury rate as a riskfree rate and forward-looking equity risk premiums, as they did before the downgrade. With all of that said, though, the Moody's action does carry symbolic weight, another indicator that US exceptionalism, which allowed the US to take economic and fiscal actions that would have brought blowback for other countries, especially in emerging markets, is coming to an end. That is healthy, in the long term, for both the United States and the rest of the world, but it will come with short term pain. YouTube Video