Concerns over China's growing debt burden have been mounting for a couple of years now, culminating in rating agency Moody's May 2017 decision to downgrade the country's rating from A1 from Aa3 and assign it a negative outlook. Moody's said at the time that the decision was based on its expectation that "China's financial strength will erode somewhat over the coming years, with economy-wide debt continuing to rise as potential growth slows." It also anticipated that while "the authorities' commitment to reform is clear" — as shown, for example, in steps taken to contain the rise in state-owned enterprise debt and discourage certain SOEs from further investment — "we do not think that the reform effort will have sufficient impact, sufficiently quickly, to contain the erosion of credit strength associated with the combination of rising economy-wide leverage and slower growth," Moody's said at the time.