Toyota Motor, the world’s biggest automaker and a towering icon of Japanese industrial power, has been stripped of its AAA credit rating under the darkening global economic storm.
The downgrade, said analysts at Fitch Ratings, effectively passes sentence on the entire worldwide auto industry, showing that the business of building cars can no longer produce a single player with the sort of cast-iron corporate resilience of Exxon Mobil or Johnson & Johnson.
“This crisis is demonstrating that the auto industry cannot support a triple-A rating,” said Frederic Gits, a Tokyo-based credit analyst at Fitch Ratings, which issued the downgrade earlier today and declared the auto-industry’s problems “substantial and fundamental”.
Fitch Ratings’ downgrade of Toyota’s unsecured debt to AA deals a stunning blow to Japanese corporate pride, but reflects “severe” turmoil across world car markets and the company’s own spectacular profits warning earlier this month.
To demonstrate the extent of the problem, brokers in Tokyo have recently started circulating aerial photographs of a military airfield in Oxfordshire that has become a colossal warehouse for thousands of unsold cars.
The United States may be on course to lose its ‘AAA’ rating due to the large amount of debt it has accumulated, according to Martin Hennecke, senior manager of private clients at Tyche.
“The U.S. might really have to look at a default on the bankruptcy reorganization of the present financial system” and the bankruptcy of the government is not out of the realm of possibility, Hennecke said.
“In the United States there is already a funding crisis, and they will have to sell a lot more bonds next year to fund the bailout packages that have already been signed off,” Hennecke told CNBC.
In order to solve or stem the economic slowdown, Hennecke suggested the US would have to radically reduce spending across all sectors and recall all its troops from around the world.
As for a stimulus package, there is not much of an industry left to stimulate back into life, Hennecke said.
Deven Sharma (R), president of Standard & Poor’s and Raymond McDaniel, chairman and CEO of Moody’s Corporation listen to remarks by committee members as they display a quote on a screen during the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on “Credit Rating Agencies and the Financial Crisis,” on Capitol Hill in Washington October 22, 2008.
Oct. 22 (Bloomberg) — Employees at Moody’s Investors Service told executives that issuing dubious creditworthy ratings to mortgage-backed securities made it appear they were incompetent or “sold our soul to the devil for revenue,” according to e-mails obtained by U.S. House investigators.
The e-mail was one of several documents made public today at a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in Washington, which is reviewing the role played by Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Ratings in the global credit freeze.
“The story of the credit rating agencies is a story of colossal failure,” Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, said at the hearing. “The result is that our entire financial system is now at risk.”
Moody’s and S&P in recent months had to downgrade thousands of mortgage-backed securities, many of which were originally given top AAA ratings, as delinquencies on the underlying loans soared well beyond the companies’ estimates and home values fell faster than they expected.
WaMu Said to Approach Blackstone as Bailout Debated
Sept. 25 (Bloomberg) — Washington Mutual Inc.’s options may be dwindling as potential bidders shy away from making an offer because it’s not clear how much the proposed $700 billion U.S. bank rescue package will benefit the Seattle-based lender.
Five banks that were considering bids, including JPMorgan Chase & Co., have failed to make an offer in the week since WaMu put itself up for sale. WaMu next approached Carlyle Group and Blackstone Group LP, two people briefed on the matter said. Those talks are preliminary, and hinge on the government’s role in helping WaMu, which faces an estimated $19 billion in bad loans, the people said, speaking anonymously because the discussions are private.
“A WaMu deal is likely frozen until the bailout gets worked out,” said Steven Kaplan, a finance professor at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. “People aren’t in a hurry to make any decision until they know what’s coming out of Washington.”
WaMu is under increasing pressure to strike a deal as its stock sags and ratings companies pummel its debt. Standard & Poor’s yesterday cut WaMu’s rating for the second time in nine days, dropping it to CCC from BB-.WaMu’sregulator, the Office of Thrift Supervision, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which guarantees customer deposits, have declined to comment.
WHEN I drove to the Beverly Hills offices of Drexel Burnham Lambert on Feb. 13, 1990, the last thing I expected to hear was that the investment bank where I worked was going under. Yet early that morning, we were told that the company was filing for bankruptcy. I was, to put it mildly, blown away. At the time, Drexel had $3.5 billion in assets and was the biggest underwriter of junk bonds.
It all seemed like a very big deal at the time. But what’s happening this week makes me pine for the good old days.
Nation’s largest insurer races to raise capital after being hit by credit raters.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Shares of American International Group tumbled Tuesday as the company scrambled to raise as much as $75 billion to keep itself afloat.
The pressure on the nation’s largest insurer reached fevered pitch on Monday night as the troubled insurer was hit by a series of credit rating downgrades.
The cuts could prove deadly to AIG (AIG, Fortune 500), forcing it to post more than $13 billion in additional collateral.Shares were down 42% in early morning trading, after falling more than 70% in early morning trading and losing 61% of their value the day before.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Shares of American International Group fell more than 50 percent in early trading on reports that the insurer had turned to the Federal Reserve for $40 billion in bridge financing to ward off a liquidity crisis and ratings downgrades.
AIG shares dropped 52 percent to $5.82 on the New York Stock Exchange before recouping a bit to $7.41. The shares have fallen 80 percent this year and closed Friday at $12.14.
Sept. 14 (Bloomberg) — Bank of America Corp. reached a deal to acquire Merrill Lynch & Co. for about $44 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported, after shares of the third-biggest U.S. securities firm fell by more than 35 percent last week and smaller rival Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. neared bankruptcy.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Standard & Poor’s on Thursday cut ratings on all three major U.S. automakers deeper into junk status, citing expected losses due to higher gas prices and a weakening U.S. economy.
S&P cut its ratings for General Motors Corp (GM.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), Ford Motor Co (F.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) and Chrysler Automotive LLC to “B-minus,” or six levels below investment grade, from “B.” It also cut to “B-minus” from “B” the finance arms of Ford, Chrysler and GMAC, which is 49 percent owned by GM.
So Inflation is really the greatest export of the US. _____________________________________________________________________________________
LONDON (Reuters) - Three days before the last bout of coordinated central bank intervention to calm world currency markets, the International Monetary Fund’s top economist opined: “If not now, when?” Many experts are now asking the same.
