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Fitch gives USA its stamp of approval
Fitch leaves munis tied to U.S. rating at AAA, S&P downgrades Fitch Ratings, one of the three major rating agencies and the one considered the most accurate by institutional investors, has affirmed...
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Does a downgrade cost anything?
The debt of the United States was downgraded by Standard & Poor’s several weeks ago, but the price of U.S. Treasuries have skyrocketed since then. This confuses many people because a baseline...
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Political heat at S&P for ratings downgrades?
The Daily Show – What Are You Friggin’ Nuts Over There? S&P replaces president after U.S. downgrade The board of directors of McGraw-Hill met Monday and voted to oust Deven Sharma as president...
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The gusher of municipal bond information
The municipal bond market is often thought of as complex and murky. This is understandable; after all, there are over 50,000 issuers of bonds and a million plus specific municipal-bond issues. It’s...
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Project Sugar has soured
Missouri has a sweet mess on its hands. A half-completed manufacturing facility, financed with industrial revenue bonds underwritten by the small municipality of Moberly, has gone bust. The politics...
View ArticleCutting the ratings agencies the tiniest bit of slack
After polluting the global financial system with hundreds of billions of dollars of overrated mortgage-backed securities and helping bring down the world economy, the credit rating agencies have been...
View ArticleHow risky is that rating?
The Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board’s data platform for municipal bonds, EMMA, recently added credit ratings from Fitch and Standard & Poors to the system. This makes it really simple for...
View ArticleThe birds’-eye view of muniland
My Thomson Reuters colleague at Municipal Market Data, Daniel Berger, published an excellent report on the debt of the 40 poorest U.S. cities. His work is exclusively for MMD subscribers, but I...
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Credit ratings beyond the S&P case
The long awaited prosecution against a U.S. credit rating has finally arrived. The Department of Justice filed a civil suit this week alleging that Standard & Poor’s committed mail and wire fraud...
View ArticleThe false equivalence of credit ratings
By Cate Long In a new report, Janney Capital Markets analyst Tom Kozlik calls out Standard & Poor’s for credit ratings on local governments that he says are too liberal. Kozlik claims that S&P...
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