Fallen Angels Dwindle While Rising Stars Continue to Ascend: Corporate Credit


The pandemic-fuelled deterioration in credit quality for many corporations may be coming to an end. Credit Benchmark noted early signs of improving credit quality last month. The latest consensus data update provides more evidence that corporate credit quality is improving across a number of sectors.

The rate of increase of Fallen Angels is slowing to a trickle. Now, only 1,070 firms out of a global sample of 6,895 (16%) have migrated from investment-grade to high-yield at some point since February of 2020, a modest change from 1,051 Fallen Angels in the last update. Of the 1,070 that have fallen into high-yield in this time period, only 718 (10% of total sample) retain this status compared to 734 in the last update. This means that a third of companies that became Fallen Angels during the COVID period have since migrated back to investment-grade [please continue below to access full report].

Fallen Angels – Sector Comparison

Credit Benchmark data is now available on Bloomberg – high level credit assessments on the single name constituents of the sectors mentioned in this report can be accessed on CRPR or via CRDT . Get in touch with us to request your free trial for Credit Benchmark Premium Data and Analytics on Bloomberg.

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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.