Apparently undeterred by the continuing difficulties facing some institutions and by the country's lack of an international credit rating foreign banks are eyeing the Nigerian market for bargains.
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It said banks, mortgage companies, investors and credit-rating agencies all share in the blame for creating the crisis.
For the European banks, Moody's and the other credit rating agencies are seen as grim reapers, going from country to country pronouncing in more-or-less all of them that the banks are less strong than they once were.
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But because it is mostly owned by domestic investors, especially huge banks and insurance companies, the country's credit rating has remained steady.
So the high probability that credit-rating agencies will downgrade UK banks' debt, as and when the government accepts the recommendations of the Banking Commission, should in theory have no impact on the price banks pay to borrow.
Today, as if it was a new revelation, a credit rating agency reported that U.S. banks are exposed to European debt and are at risk .
With bond markets fretful, particularly about a Socialist victory, and French banks in trouble, France could even lose its triple-A credit rating.
Preferred stock is often issued by banks that don't want to issue debt that can affect their credit rating, or by utilities whose investors generally expect income rather than growing earnings.
The suggested revision adds two ideas to the same basic regime: in deciding how much capital is needed, make greater use of, first, credit-rating agencies' measures of risk and, second, banks' internal risk-management models.
Credit rating agencies are considering downgrades of BNP Paribas and two other major French banks.
That discrepancy is likely to widen after recent credit-rating downgrades hit Morgan Stanley, one of the last remaining investment banks, particularly hard.
Although Mycal's credit rating had fallen sharply, fund managers at Meiji Dresdner, believing that creditor banks would bail out the retailer, had failed to reduce their Mycal holdings.
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Credit rating agencies were giving top-notch ratings to what were essentially toxic assets that banks would then turn around and sell to investors.
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IBCA, a credit-rating agency, the average return on equity earned by the world's 500 biggest commercial banks has climbed above 10% only once, in 1993.
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