Private actors like credit rating agencies (CRAs) in the financial market possess regulatory authority to the extent of rendering the efforts of states and inter-governmental organisations futile. This chapter examines the source of authority for the CRAs, and in doing so draws attention to the infrastructure of international finance. The authority of CRAs rests in the institutional design of the financial infrastructure, a design that seeks to satisfy the desire for credit information in the market. In other words, the CRAs possess an imagined authority. This reveals an important aspect of the financial market: some cornerstones in the financial market architecture are constructed out of a broader desire for those cornerstones, and sometimes herd ‘belief’ is enough to give them effect. Realising this fictional aspect of the architecture is useful, as it exposes—at least in this aspect—that it is the desire of (those with) capital that the architecture of international finance serves. The chapter proposes that the attempt to better understand, deconstruct, and eventually reconstruct power and hegemony in international finance requires critical examinations of its infrastructure, with an understanding that said infrastructure is made and constantly shaped by political and economic powers through legal means.