With the present work I aim to shed new light on the debate on possible pro-cyclicality of the foreign sovereign credit ratings issued by credit rating agencies (CRAs), considering their behavior in the current financial crisis. I find that the assumption of a pro-cyclical behavior of CRAs appears to be groundless when referring to the period 2001-2011. Actually, even though the ratings issued throughout the pre-crisis period (2001-2006) are generally higher than the predicted ones, there is no evidence of CRAs assigning unduly worse ratings during the years of the crisis (2007-2011).