PrefBlog

Standard & Poor’s has announced:

• •We believe that the Canadian banking sector is encountering incremental pressure from headwinds facing the Canadian economy, which is heightening economic risk in the banking system.
• •We also believe industry risk for the Canadian banking sector is increasing. We expect that intensifying competition for loans and deposits will lead to pressure on profitability growth, especially in banks’ retail businesses.
• •We are lowering our long- and short-term issuer credit ratings on National Bank of Canada to ‘A-/A-2’ from ‘A/A-1’, following our revision of the stand-alone credit profile on the bank to ‘a-‘ from ‘a’. The outlook is stable.
• •The stable outlook reflects our expectation that National Bank of Canada’s credit fundamentals will remain consistent with current ratings over the next 24 months.

In distinction to S&P’s views regarding CM, there is no allusion to NA being systemically important and no expectation of government support in times of stress.

S&P’s prior Negative Outlook on NA was reported on PrefBlog.

NA has the following preferred share issues outstanding: NA.PR.K (Series 15, called for redemption); NA.PR.L (Series 16); NA.PR.M (Series 20); NA.PR.N (Series 21); NA.PR.O (Series 24); NA.PR.P (Series 26); NA.PR.Q (Series 28). All have been downgraded to P-2 from P-2(high).

This entry was posted on Friday, December 14th, 2012 at 12:37 am and is filed under Issue Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.