July Credit Update: High Number of Upgrades and Downgrades, Upgrades Significantly Outnumber Downgrades


Credit Benchmark has published the latest monthly credit consensus data (from June 2017), with 15 contributor banks now providing bank-sourced credit views (CBCs*) on more than 10,700 separate legal entities over the past 12 months.

Government coverage now includes Colorado, Michigan, Indiana, South Carolina and Oklahoma.

Additions to the data include Hochtief AG, Barnes & Noble Inc, Dollar General Corp, JCdecaux SA, UCB SA, Tegna Inc, McAfee LLC, Football Association Ltd, Merlin Entertainments PLC, Wellington Management Co LLP, Arab Bank Plc and Arab Monetary Fund.

 

Monthly consensus upgrades and downgrades:

  • 896 obligors saw improved consensus in their credit standing by at least one notch,
  • 453 obligors deteriorated,
  • 158 moved more than one notch, compared with the previous month, upgrades significantly outweigh downgrades and CBC changes are more frequent.

This compares with the previous month which showed improved consensus across 200 obligors and decreased consensus across 309. Amongst those obligors that saw movement, 61 moved by more than one notch.

Industries:

• Upgrades dominate downgrades in 6 out of 9 reported industries.
• The most significant improvement of credit quality occurred in Health Care with 28 upgrades and 7 downgrades,
• Oil and Gas with 58 upgrades and 19 downgrades,
• and Utilities with 32 upgrades and 11 downgrades.
• Industries with deteriorating credit ratings include Telecommunications with six downgrades and three upgrades, Industrials with 107 downgrades and 75 upgrades, and Consumer Services with 77 downgrades and 62 upgrades.
• The prevalence of upgrades is most significant in Financials with 331 upgrades and only 78 downgrades.

 

 

*CBC = Credit Benchmark Consensus; a 21-category scale which is explicitly linked to probability of default estimates sourced from major banks. A CBC of bbb+ is broadly comparable with BBB+ from S&P and Fitch or Baa1 from Moody’s.

Disclaimer: Credit Benchmark does not solicit any action based upon this report, which is not to be construed as an invitation to buy or sell any security or financial instrument. This report is not intended to provide personal investment advice and it does not take into account the investment objectives, financial situation and the particular needs of a particular person who may read this report.


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Credit Benchmark brings together internal credit risk views from over 40 leading global financial institutions. The contributions are anonymized, aggregated, and published in the form of consensus ratings and aggregate analytics to provide an independent, real-world perspective of credit risk. Risk and investment professionals at banks, insurance companies, asset managers and other financial firms use the data for insights into the unrated, monitoring and alerting within their portfolios, benchmarking, assessing and analyzing trends, and fulfilling regulatory requirements and capital.