Welcome

Welcome to Standard & Poor’s Recovery Ratings. The purpose of this site is to give you easy access to the most important recent documents related to our work on recovery and links to other sites related to leveraged loans.

In December 2003 Standard & Poor’s Rating Services became the first rating agency to assign recovery ratings (debt instrument-specific estimates of post–default principal recovery) to senior secured loans in the leveraged loan market in the United States. Since then we have expanded our leadership in the development of post-default recovery analytics and have assigned recovery ratings to over 4,100 loans and other secured instruments globally. In May 2004 recovery ratings were introduced to leveraged loans in the European leveraged loan market, and have since been expanded to Canada and Australia. In October 2006 we announced that we would, subject to market feedback and sufficient data, roll out recovery ratings in three additional ways: throughout the organization’s capital structure to include unsecured debt; in sectors beyond corporates such as sovereigns and banks; and in new jurisdictions once we had analyzed the insolvency regimes.

On 30 May 2007, we announced changes to our recovery rating scale which, along with our enhanced analytics, will give investors what they have demanded, namely, greater clarity and specificity with respect to recovery prospects on debt instruments of all types of issuers globally.

On 19th March 2008, Standard & Poor's assigned recovery ratings to more than 1,800 unsecured loan and bond issues sold by nearly 900 speculative-grade rated corporate issuers in the U.S., Canada and Europe.

For a list of all our existing recovery ratings and accompanying issue ratings, as well as recent commentary about enhancements and changes to Standard & Poor’s recovery rating scale and issue-rating policies, please see the articles and other links to the right.