Commentaries
Now raising intellectual capital
Investors ignore ratings at their peril
   Rexam is delivering a nasty surprise to its shareholders, but the logic of its proposed rights issue is hard to fault.
   If trading turns out to be as bad as the board expects, then the penalty payments for refinancing its existing debt will far outweigh the cost and dilution of the issue.
   Broker Oriel Securities reckons the cost to Rexam if it loses its investment grade rating will be an extra 8 to 12 million pounds a year in interest payments.
   Businesses everywhere are rediscovering the joys of equity, as the way to stave off the dreaded downgrade. So far this year, shareholders have put up $119 billion, according to Thomson Reuters data, with $28 billion more due.
   Even cash-rich carmaker Volkswagen is reported to be considering issuing shares to bolster cash reserves and pre-empt any ratings downgrade relating to its merger with Porsche. Spanish utility Iberdrola and French construction groups Lafarge and Saint Gobain all took similar steps to bolster their ratings.
   Unfortunately, credit ratings agencies are so jumpy about regulators and the risks of legal action by investors that companies can’t always bank on such moves working.
   Saint Gobain launched a rights issue, but still S&P cut it to BBB from BBB+. Lafarge did worse. Fitch not only cut its rating to BBB-, it added a “negative outlook”.
   One reason ratings have increased in importance is that as banks have turned off the taps, companies have turned to the bond markets, allowing the agencies like Moody’s Corp and McGraw-Hill’s S&P to cash in.
   Experience has taught them caution, however, and the number of issues downgraded from investment grade to junk is on the rise. The threat of this — with the higher cost of borrowing and reduced market access it brings — is a powerful incentive to go to the shareholders. S&P has identified 75 issuers — with $255 billion of debt — in danger of losing their coveted investment grade.
   The unhappy experience of Rexam shareholders is likely to repeated many times as the debt crisis unwinds, but at least it’s better than losing control of the business to its lenders.
Breaking the credit ratings habit
How many times do investors need to rail against rating firms’ credibility before things really change? Standard & Poor’s set off the most recent round of vitriol on Tuesday after it raised the ratings on bonds backed by commercial mortgages back to sterling AAA just a week after it cut them. It tweaked its assumptions after investors complained about the downgrades.
There’s good reason to be upset. Ratings changes still have real world consequences, even though the credit crisis has gone a long way to discredit them.
File this under “what took so long?”
Looks like at least one heavyweight pension fund, Calpers, is taking the much maligned ratings firms Moody’s Investors Service, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch to court for their role in making investors feel warm and fuzzy about complex financial instruments that it turns out no one really understood.
New York Times reports that Calpers is blaming about $1 billion in losses on “wildly inaccurate” ratings applied to securities that included those backed by subprime mortgages.
-
The Wall
