PrefBlog

Moody’s downgraded the UK:

Britain lost its top credit rating by Moody’s Investors Service, which cited the continuing weakness in the nation’s growth outlook and the challenges that presents to the government’s fiscal consolidation program.

The rating on the U.K. was lowered one level to Aa1 from Aaa and the outlook on the nation’s debt changed to stable, Moody’s said in a statement today. With the U.K.’s high and rising debt burden, a deterioration in the government’s balance sheet is unlikely to be reversed before 2016, Moody’s said in the statement.

Yen Lee, a successful IT entrepreneur, has some hard truths about Canadians:

Canadians in general are looking for safe day jobs. Because Vancouver and Canada in general have not had the history of the home runs, like the Googles and the Yahoos and the Facebooks. And so, because they don’t see the upside, all they see is the risk involved with a start-up—because start-ups in Canada are sub-scale and don’t end up being big enough to exit. And that leaves the folks who are willing, that have a desire to be disruptive, the folks with an appetite for risk; those folks in Canada usually end up in the U.S.

It was a mixed day for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualPremiums down 10bp, FixedResets gaining 4bp and DeemedRetractibles off 4bp. Volatility was minor. Volume was above average.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 23rd, 2013 at 2:17 am and is filed under Market Action. 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.