Moody's waarschuwt België voor afwaardering
Laatste update: 7 oktober 2011 23:16 info
WASHINGTON - Kredietbeoordelaar Moody's heeft België vrijdag gewaarschuwd dat de nationalisatie van de bank Dexia kan leiden tot een verlaging van de waardering van zijn staatsschulden.
Dat blijkt uit een verklaring die Moody's heeft gepubliceerd.
België heeft nu de status Aa1-waardering, de op één na hoogste waardering.
De kredietbeoordelaar zegt de kwetsbaarheid van het West-Europese land voor de schuldencrisis in de eurozone te onderzoeken. Dat geldt ook voor de groeikansen van de Belgische economie en de onzekerheid over eventuele steun aan het bankensysteem, in het bijzonder aan Dexia.
Moody's is nu wel heel gretig met de waarschuwingen.... Bij de hypotheek bubble in eigen land liepen ze achter de feiten aan... Nu hangen ze de europese landen aan de hoogste wilg als het effe kan...
Moody's CEO Wins the Blame-Shifting Prize
by: Tom Brown January 29, 2008
Did you see what Raymond McDaniel, Moody's CEO, had to say in Davos last week about any blame the ratings agencies might deserve regarding the subprime mess? It's pretty shocking: "A lot of things could have been done better," he told a panel at the World Economic Forum. "Some are the responsibility of rating agencies, some of other participants in the market. In hindsight it is pretty clear to us there was a failure in some key assumptions supporting our analytics and our models. The key assumptions failed in part because the information policy, completeness and veracity feeding the work agencies were doing, was deteriorating." [Emph. added]
How pathetic. The rating agencies have long insisted they aren’t responsible for verifying the accuracy of the information they use to assign ratings. That may or may not make sense. But they are certainly free to ask for whatever information they think they need to make an informed judgment. That’s one reason we have agencies in the first place: they, and only they, are allowed systematic access to material non-public information about issuers. So for McDaniel to imply that the agencies were somehow victims in all this because they didn’t have the information they needed is a total and complete crock. If they didn’t have enough information, they should have asked for more.
For that matter, I don’t buy McDaniel’s implication that the agencies weren’t to blame for the mortgage CDO fiasco because some of the data they were given—like, say, about loans for homes that were supposedly going to be occupied by the borrower when in fact he was an investor/speculator—was incorrect. Maybe in normal times agencies shouldn’t be on the hook for the accuracy of the information they depend on. But the housing bubble, and attendant blizzard of CDO issuance, was not a normal time. The agencies must have realized that. Even out of a general sense of natural curiosity, didn’t anyone wonder whether, in the midst of a soaring, speculation-riddled housing market, some of the numbers they were relying on might be made up?
In my view, the rating agencies have behaved disgracefully throughout this whole mess. First, they played a large role in pumping up the bubble by blithely slapping AAA ratings on securities that, we now know, didn’t come close to deserving them. Now that the mortgage market has come crashing down, they have repeatedly tightened their models to absurdly conservative levels. Standard & Poor’s move to revise its models twice in a month is especially disturbing. How can a company know how much capital it needs to raise when the agencies keep moving the goalposts?
In theory, the agencies are supposed to be the disinterested players with the data and sophisticated models, who keep their heads when the markets are going crazy around them. No longer. Now Moody’s says it is taking “market sentiment” into account when it sets ratings on the monoline bond insurers. What’s market sentiment got to do with it? Either the insurers have the ability to pay claims in a worst-case scenario, or they don’t. By relying on sentiment as an input, the agencies create the upheaval and uncertainty that their ratings are designed to prevent.
We had an internal debate around here a few weeks ago whether the agency model would survive the current crisis. I came down on the side that it would survive. But if the agencies continue to act irrationally, I don’t know how the model can.
U.S. banking regulators made banks’ real credit problems worse in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The rating agencies are the ones exacerbating the credit crunch this time around.
Fitch waardeert Spanje en Italië af
Laatste update: 7 oktober 2011 21:44 info
LONDEN - Kredietbeoordelaar Fitch heeft zijn waarderingen van de staatsschulden van Spanje en Italië vrijdag verlaagd. Het bedrijf wees in beide gevallen op de gevaren van de schuldencrisis.
Foto: ANP De rating van Spanje ging met twee stappen omlaag van AA+ naar AA-. De kredietbeoordeling van Italië ging met één stap omlaag, van AA- naar A+.
De vooruitzichten van beide landen zijn volgens Fitch negatief, wat betekent dat er in de komende tijd een nieuwe afwaardering kan volgen.
Risico
In het geval van Spanje wees Fitch, naast de escalatie van de schuldencrisis, op het risico dat regionale overheden hun bezuinigingsdoelstellingen niet halen. Daarnaast denkt het dat de groei van de Spaanse economie lager uitvalt dan eerder gedacht. Tot 2015 zal die groei niet hoger zijn dan 2 procent, voorspelde het bedrijf.
Italië is volgens Fitch door de hoge staatsschuld en de zwakke economische vooruitzichten bijzonder kwetsbaar voor economische schokken.
De kredietbeoordelaar was positief over de recent aangenomen bezuinigingsmaatregelen, maar bekritiseerde de moeizame manier waarop de politieke besluiten tot stand kwamen.