Enron is bankrupt, and Dynegy and El Paso are struggling to maintain their bond ratings.
Lisa Goldstein, the head of health care bond ratings at Moody's, explains that connection.
Bottom Line: You may profit by adding bond ratings to your checklist for picking stocks.
But it is near the bottom in business and tax climate and state bond ratings.
This is the second time in less than a year that Dagong has downgraded US bond ratings.
What you can do, however, is add bond ratings to the factors you consider in selecting stocks.
Unfortunately, exploiting bond ratings to make a killing in stocks is not as easy as finding the ratings.
Lisa Goldstein, the head of health care bond ratings at Moody's, argues that better quality control can improve hospitals' financial performance.
Indian banking stocks surged after Moody's unified India's foreign and local currency government bond ratings at Baa3 and left ratings of government-related issuers unchanged.
The revival came despite a warning from Moody's, which its outlook on Citigroup's bond ratings to negative, saying the first-quarter charges were higher than had been expected.
In the event the ratings agency cut Greek long-term bond ratings by two notches to B from BB- and said that the outlook may bring a further weakening.
As if to prove their point, the bond ratings agencies noted that delinquencies in the prime loan market had risen, but not by as much and not nearly at the magnitude of the subprime sector.
For individuals the good news is that there are mutual funds that make it easy to invest in diversified portfolios of floating-rate loans, mostly made by banks to corporations with less than investment-grade bond ratings.
This cascade of higher income taxes started in 2011 when Illinois, arguably the big state with the weakest economy, and the lowest bond ratings, raised income taxes by 66% and business taxes by 46%.
The revival came despite a warning from Moody's, which its outlook on Citigroup (nyse: C - news - people )'s bond ratings to negative, saying the first-quarter charges were higher than had been expected.
Still, bond ratings agencies that assess the risks to the broader market said the damage seems to be relatively contained to a few subprime lenders, like New Century, with portfolios that are heavily concentrated in the subprime sector.
The "AAA" financial strength rating is crucial to bond insurers because they effectively transfer their ratings to bond issuers.
While the current ratings of bond insurers lend nothing to the credit standing of the bond issuer, most insured issues should still be viewed as having viable insurance backing in case of distress.
In the ratings inflation of the bond-rating world, that's not a gentleman's passing grade.
Bond insurers use their top credit ratings to insure bonds issued by municipalities and others against default.
Iceland still has junk bond status in the eyes of the ratings agencies.
The website has put together a handy list of all the Bond movies and their respective Rotten Tomato ratings.
Many people now see it as a distinct possibility that several bond insurers will lose their triple-A ratings and go into run-off because of their massive exposures to troubled credit derivatives.
The purpose of bond insurance is to enable municipalities with lower credit ratings to piggy-back on the higher rating of the insurer, lowering their borrowing costs.
While bank lending remained an important source of financing, companies of all sizes and all credit ratings had the option of accessing the bond markets and, by the end of the 1980s through the issuance of high yield securities, a different universe of creditors.
Anybody in a ratings agency who equates a 1989-style Brady Bond with what is being proposed now might stand guilty of that old "structured by cows" problem.
Washington and Wall Street have bristled at the thought of a bail-out for the bond insurers, though they have also been wary of leaving the municipal bond market exposed to the capital-constrained bond insurers, who face losing their triple-A credit ratings--those who haven't lost them already, that is.
Moody's Investors Service and Fitch Ratings each downgraded Kodak's debt deeper into junk-bond territory this week.
In the bond market they will have to demand higher yields from companies with low ratings than from their more creditworthy rivals.
The bond insurers have been fighting to keep their top-notch triple-A ratings.
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