It s natural that the state of global markets will have some kind of ripple effect, says Greg Kabance, managing director for Latin American structured finance at Fitch Ratings, the international credit ratings agency.

Poor 2012 corporate financial results will further undermine credit ratings.

One of my favorite (sad) stories concerns consumer credit ratings in Russia.

The credit ratings agencies have been held accountable in two private suits.

Investors use credit ratings as a factor in pricing loans on bonds.

Ten eurozone countries had just been downgraded by the ratings agency Standard Poor s.

A description of how credit ratings for a United Nations bond would be established is set out below.

The ratings agency Moody s is preparing warnings about the extent and quality of Indian private sector debt.

Moreover, several African countries have received ratings from credit agencies, which has opened up global financial centers to them.

The obligations of certain organizations, such as the World Bank, are defined as quasi sovereign by the credit ratings agencies.

The eurozone s immediate challenge is declining fiscal stability in a subset of countries whose credit ratings are falling and debt service costs rising.

If governments that retain strong credit ratings are to spend scarce resources effectively, the most effective approach is to catalyze debt workouts and reductions.

CDS rates for these countries rose, their credit ratings were lowered and the yield spreads on their government bonds versus Germany widened to an alarming extent.

NEW YORK Until six days before Lehman Brothers collapsed five years ago, the ratings agency Standard Poor s maintained the firm s investment grade rating of A.

Imported ratings

Likewise, the ECB should have barred banks from the risky CDS market, where they are held hostage to ratings agencies decisions about what constitutes a credit event.

Internal audit ratings

The just collapsed credit bubble, fueled by so called special investment vehicles, derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, and phony triple A ratings, was built on the illusions of mathematical modeling.

What is the modern equivalent of branding with a scarlet A, which was the penalty for adultery in colonial New England? Maybe the credit ratings agencies have the answer.

Implementation of that approach would essentially result in the utilization of the high credit ratings of some Member States to enhance the overall credit rating of a United Nations bond issue, which would benefit all Member States since it would lower the overall cost of borrowing.

It is enough to remember that in 2008 there were only 12 public companies in the world with AAA credit ratings, but more than 60,000 mostly American triple A structured financial products.

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Table 1 Internal audit ratings

Ratings that pretend to take into account systemic risk might prove as dangerous as ratings that ignore such risk.

The Asian Development Bank is working on innovative mechanisms to bring more finance to the infrastructure sector, such as the recent partial credit guarantee facility set up by India Infrastructure Finance Company Limited in collaboration with the ADB. By boosting the credit ratings of infrastructure projects via credit enhancements, this facility will allow pension funds and insurers to invest in infrastructure projects.

Set all ratings to this value

A very likely downgrade of these insurers credit ratings will force banks and financial institutions that hold these risky assets to write them down, adding another 150 billion to the financial system s mounting losses.

Indeed, the most curious aspect of the ECB s position was its threat not to accept restructured government bonds as collateral if the ratings agencies decided that the restructuring should be classified as a credit event.

For businesses that do not have strong, well established credit ratings, term loan financing will generally be available only if the business is able to grant security rights in its assets to secure the financing.

Any United Nations bond issue would be evaluated by market participants and potential investors by its credit rating, which is a formal evaluation of the creditworthiness of the bond issue by an independent credit rating agency.

This saved Europe from overly large external imbalances. Now, without exchange rate risk, interest rate spreads based on debtor countries credit ratings are the only remaining defense against excessive capital movements and the resulting external imbalances.

Ratings agencies had incentives to give good ratings to the high risk securities produced by the investment banks that were paying them.

Yet, those of us who are exposed on a daily basis to the inner workings of financial markets would caution against too upbeat an attitude toward a second downgrade by a major ratings agency.

Political pundits agree that presidential approval ratings are highly correlated with gas prices when prices go up, a president s poll ratings go down.

Lending, too, is being transformed by technology. Crowdsourced funding and peer to peer lending schemes give borrowers the opportunity to circumvent many of the hurdles of traditional banking including, in some cases, collateral requirements and credit ratings.

Another is that US ratings agencies helped fool the world by giving triple A ratings to their American clients, while aggressively downgrading foreign borrowers.

Even if ratings were no longer required or encouraged by law, however, demand for ratings and the need to improve their reliability would remain.

For details on these ratings and the specific associated OpenVMS versions and ratings, see the NCSC and Common Criteria pages, and the associated product listings.

Oil prices are soaring, as are Putin s approval ratings.

Indeed, it is clear that ratings were ridiculously distorted.

President Dmitri Medvedev s approval ratings are only slightly lower.

Sovereign debts, junk ratings protests take to the street

His ratings have dipped below 50 for the first time.

While a big US rating agency gave European companies, on average, only a triple B rating in recent years, CDOs based on MBSs easily obtained triple A ratings. According to the IMF, 80 of CDOs were in this category.

Credit Where Credit is Due