Two state insurers, the same country, opposite answers

Every export credit agency publishes where it will and will not cover. Nobody reads them side by side, because until you do there is no reason to think they would say different things. They do.

In 49 markets the 5 agencies read here disagree about whether a buyer can be insured at medium or long term. One says no; another says yes. Both positions are public, current, and published by a government.

That alone would be a curiosity. What makes it useful is that 20 of those 49 disagreements have the same shape.

One closes the country. The other closes the state.

The agency that says no says it about the country. The agency that says yes has not disagreed about the country at all — it has published four positions instead of one, and only two of them are refusals. A ministry or a state utility is off cover. A bank or a corporate buyer is not.

So the two are not contradicting each other. They are answering different questions, and one of them is answering a question the other never asked.

Why this matters more than it sounds

"Sri Lanka is closed" is a sentence an exporter can hear once and act on for a year. It is wrong, and the correction is not a nuance — it is the difference between a market you write off and a market where a private buyer is insurable today.

The unit is not the country. It is the obligor.

Across all 201 countries assessed by the agency that publishes a ladder, a public non-sovereign buyer is off cover in 149 of them. A bank is off cover in 20. Same countries, same agency, same day — a factor of 7.5 apart, and it turns entirely on who signs.

What we did with it

Every market page here now prints each agency's position beside the others, per class of obligor, with the agency's own wording and a link to its own page. Where two disagree, both are printed and neither is averaged away.

That is the whole product in one line: none of this is private, and none of it is assembled anywhere else.