Merkel calls for European ratings agency

"It is important in the medium term that Europe also has a ratings agency," she said in an interview with public broadcaster ARD.

"The Chinese now have a ratings agency themselves," the chancellor said, referring to the Dagong agency.

"We cannot of course create one through the states," she said.

But she would welcome it if the European economy managed to set up a ratings agency, she added.

On Wednesday, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said he wanted to break the power of ratings agencies to limit their influence after controversial decisions in the eurozone debt crisis.

"We must break the oligopoly of the ratings agencies," he told reporters a day after Moody's downgraded Portugal's debt to speculative status.

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said Friday there was a growing consensus among European Union members that the ratings agencies needed to be regulated.

Barroso, himself a former Portuguese prime minister, said the Moody's downgrade signalled an anti-European bias and suggested it was time for a European agency to counter the US-dominated groups.

European Commissioner for Justice Viviane Reding threatened to move against the three main ratings agencies in recent comments to the German paper Die Welt.

Merkel in her comments stressed that the agencies were not bad in themselves.

But "they act at sensitive moments," she added -- and with the situation regarding the euro at such a sensitive point, they were taking no account of what was reasonable, she argued.

It was worth considering if one really had to believe everything they said, she added.

The three main agencies -- Standard and Poor's, Moody's and Fitch -- have all been criticised in recent days over their assessments of vulnerable economies.

The timing of their debt downgrades influence prices and interest rates in the sovereign bond market.

The argument against some of their assessments is that they are effectively making self-fulfilling prophecies of doom, greatly aggravating the eurozone debt crisis.

Last Monday, EU internal markets commissioner Michel Barnier said ratings agencies should be banned from issuing assessments of a country seeking international aid, after Moody's downgraded Portugal's status.

There is also an undertone of critical comment that they are based in the United States -- although Fitch is part of the French group Fimalac.

Ironically, China's Dagong agency has in the past hit out at its three Western rivals not for saying too much, but for having said too little.

They accuse them of having caused the financial crisis by failing to properly disclose risk.

After the financial crisis broke, the European Union in 2009 adopted new rules to try to strengthen the regulation of ratings agencies.