Although the international community has taken a series of steps since 2008 to bail out the global economy, it is still uncertain about whether the credit troubles are deepening and spreading, making it difficult to predict the prospects for improvement. Human society's most pressing task now is to explore the complicated origins of the current situation and choose the best way to bring about a recovery.

The global credit system is the sum total of credit relationships among creditors and debtors and the foundation of the world economy; it is founded on the socialization of credit relationships made possible by having credit-rating information available. The establishment and maintenance of every relationship between a creditor and debtor is directly or indirectly dependent on there being credit-rating information. When such data became an integral part of society, credit ratings seemingly came to dominate the modern credit economy.

The current international credit-rating system has degenerated into a tool of the world's biggest debtor interest bloc; those who compose that bloc have taken advantage of the great extent to which credit-rating information is relied upon in the process of credit globalization. They have also taken advantage of the privileges that give them a say in the rating sector, and transferred the interests of the creditor system to the debtor system, thus making them the source of damage to international credit relationships and giving rise to economic imbalances.