Articles About Fitch Ratings

If history repeats itself, QE3 will be good for commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS). The Fed’s third round of quantitative easing – which is purchasing $40 billion of residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) each month from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – will free up money for the commercial real estate market and lure investors away from […]

The world’s largest banks need to raise as much as $566 billion of common equity to meet Basel III rules on capital to be implemented by 2019, cutting shareholder returns, according to analysts at Fitch Ratings.  The 29 global banks that regulators believe are too big to fail need new capital that equals nearly 23 […]

European leaders will this week try to deliver new fiscal rules and cut Greece’s onerous debt burden.  All this in the wake of Standard & Poor’s (S&P) Eurozone downgrades. France was not the only Eurozone nation to feel the pain. Austria was cut to AA+ from AAA; Cyprus to BB+ from BBB; Italy to BBB+ […]

Standard & Poor’s slashed Spain’s credit rating to AA-, three steps beneath the highly desirable AAA, underscoring the challenges facing Europe’s major powers as they meet G20 counterparts over the eurozone debt crisis.  S&P, whose move mirrored that by fellow ratings agency Fitch, cited high unemployment, tightening credit and high private-sector debt.  Spanish 10-year government […]

Shareholders in American companies can blame Standard & Poor’s  for taking $1 trillion of their money after the rating firm downgraded Treasury securities for the first time in American history to AA+ from AAA.  Now, some of the most experienced investors say the stock market losses make no sense.  While the benchmark index for U.S. […]

Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan says that Italy is the root of most of Europe’s economic problems, as well as our own.  In a recent appearance on “Meet the Press”, “It depends on Europe, not the United States,” Greenspan said. “The United States was actually doing relatively well, sluggish but going forward until Italy ran […]

Greece, Spain, Ukraine, Austria, Latvia and Mexico are among the nations in danger of sovereign debt default, putting the global economic recovery from the recession at risk.  Sovereign debt is the debt of nations.  For example, U.S. Treasuries are backed by the “full faith and credit” of the government; similarly, other countries sell bonds to […]