Wednesday, Apr 22, 2009
Where to put your cash safely?
Global Finance: THE WORLD’S SAFEST BANKS MID-2009
50 institutions with the highest ratings from the leading credit ratings agencies Standard & Poor's, Moody's and Fitch. Looks like Nationwide and HSBC make the top 50.
Posted by mountain goat @ 02:12 PM (537 views) Add Comment
7 Comments
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1. mountain goat said...
Still looking for (mixed) good news I saw this on FT Alphaville. IMF data indicating, yes our banks are a problem, but we are not the ugliest. The percentage of GDP required to stabilise our banks is near the highest. Pretty obvious given the importance of the City.
2. 51ck-6-51x said...
Many universal banks are in there too. Some I recognise as having investment banking operations are Rabobank, BNP Paribas, Credit Agricole, Societe General, BBVA, JP Morgan, UBS, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, and Tokyo Mitsubishi; I'm sure others are there too, since I don't recognise a few.
I'm kind of surprised Barclays Plc isn't just on the list - they stand at A+/A1/AA-with total assets as of 31-Dec-2008 of $2,053bn
Maybe some of Moody's ratings are too high, particularly those nearer the bottom of this table it seems.
3. drewster said...
"the leading credit ratings agencies Standard & Poor's, Moody's and Fitch".
Ratings agencies don't know their a**** from their elbow. These are the same muppets who rated subprime mortgage CDOs as triple-A gold.
4. dohousescrashinthewoods said...
So, in the article, setting aside HSBC at 19, (which is not exactly British) the best we can do is Nationwide in 41st place?
"Stable and prudent economy" you made.
I need a Euro bank account.
5. last_days_of_disco said...
This list is almost meaningless. The credit rating agencies have been shown up for being biased and understaffed and their information is out of date. Its just a list of banks they hope are safe. I don't know what asset date means, but its not very encouraging that many of these dates are actually back in the boom times.
6. jonb said...
Lloyds used to be on that list, but disappeared when it took over HBOS. A similar fate could happen to any of the other banks on the list, particularly Nationwide which seems to be the lender of last resort for the building society sector.
7. 51ck-6-51x said...
drewster - rating agencies give a rating to a product based on it's class, not a rating across all classes. So one cannot compare an AAA bond with an AAA CDO ("apples & oranges") - this has always been made clear. However, the fact that the entity paying for the service is the issuer means that investors cannot trust the ratings of any product in which the issuer has a hand in constructing (securitised products). It comes down to the simple Latin phase so well known to house buyers - caveat emptor! One should always carry out one's own research and understand all the tools used in the process.
last_days_of_disco has a far more valid point - the data seem out of date (look at the asset date column!), and the data used in the ratings is hidden (so how out of date is that?) - one would need to asses their models, which means understanding their models (which are public) gathering all the relevant data, implementing the models and running them; and if one is going to do all of that one may as well do one's own analysis (or tweak their models).