Good to see you again. Glad you enjoy the Limes.Rating agency Standard & Poor’s continued its focus on the Caribbean with a note on Barbados’ public finances. Below in full, highlighting mine: Barbados Outlook Revised To Negative On Deteriorating Public Finances; ‘BBB’ And ‘A-3′ Foreign Currency Ratings Affirmed – We believe the timeliness and magnitude [...]
Just one month after rating agency Standard & Poor’s released a downbeat assessment of the outlook for Jamaica comes an equally – if not more – negative take from Barclays Capital Research. The research note issued today by a New York-based BarCap analyst is unequivocal: we believe that Jamaica is approaching the point of no [...]
This is bad. S&P had previously assigned a rating of B- to Jamaica. In financial parlance, a B- rating sovereign rating suggests that the country is perceived as “high risk” by would-be lenders; in a word, “junk”. By downgrading Jamaica to triple-C, S&P is saying the island is ” currently vulnerable and dependent on favorable [...]
I tend to bang on about these rating agency downgrades, but they are important. For those of you not familiar with these companies, their essence can be distilled thus: ratings agencies are arbiters of creditworthiness. In other words, agencies like Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch bestow upon companies and countries grades that indicate the [...]
S&P, which said today it was considering downgrading T&T’s sovereign credit rating, is also scrutinising the ratings of both First Citizens Bank and Republic Bank due to the fallout from the CL Financial bailout. Here are the statements, any emphasis/explanations mine: S&P: First Citizens Bank Ltd. ‘BBB+/A-2′ Rating Put On CreditWatch Negative ["CreditWatch Negative" means [...]