Introduction

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.

A list of all the recovery ratings assigned and the corresponding issue-level rating are available in Latest Announcements section below.

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 recovery ratings, in December 2003 in the US, 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, mostly in the United States, where the majority of leveraged loans are now rated.

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