Corporates

Standard & Poor’s Rating Services has been assigning bank loan ratings in the leveraged loan market since the mid 1990s. These issue ratings used class level assumptions to incorporate recovery prospects. As the leveraged loan market developed, we responded to the demand for a more sophisticated approach to the analysis of post default recovery of analysis.

We launched our recovery ratings in Europe in May 2004, which were assigned independently from the issuer or corporate credit rating. This reflected our view that secured debt issued by two corporates with the same overall default risk could have very different recovery prospects. To date, Standard & Poor’s has assigned 4,100 recovery ratings globally. On 19th March 2008 Standard & Poor's Ratings Services assigned recovery ratings to more than 1,800 unsecured loan and bond issues sold by nearly 900 speculative-grade corporate issuers globally. Of those, 150 issuers for 70 borrowers were in Europe.

For more information contact:
David Gillmor: +44 (20) 7176 3673