Corporates

In the United States, 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 by launching our recovery ratings in December 2003 in the US, and May 2004 in Europe, 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 2,200 recovery ratings globally.

For more information contact:
Bill Chew: +1 (212) 438 7981