S&P: Last week's five global defaults mark highest total in 21 months

By Caroline Salls

Pittsburgh, Dec. 19 - Standard & Poor's said the five global corporate defaults recorded last week represented the highest weekly default count in 21 months.

The agency said four issuers defaulted on Friday alone, marking the highest single-day default total since May 12, 2009.

Specifically, GMX Resources Inc., SuperMedia Inc., Aquilex Holdings LLC and Catalyst Paper Corp. defaulted on Friday and Broadlands Finance Ltd. defaulted on Thursday, according to an S&P news release.

So far in 2011, 50 S&P-rated corporate issuers have defaulted globally.

Of those, 36 are based in the United States, four in New Zealand, three in Canada and one each in the Czech Republic, Greece, France, Israel, Italy, Russia and the United Arab Emirates.

If no more corporate issuers default in 2011 and none of the issuers that have defaulted pay their debt obligations within their grace periods, S&P said the current global corporate default tally would raise the speculative-grade default rate to about 1.9% at year's end from the current 1.7%.

According to the release, this is a divergence in the trend of steady declines in the default rate for the past eight months.

In the United States, this would raise the default rate to about 2.3% from its current level of 2%, in line with the agency's forecast for an increase in the default rate to 3.1% by September 2012.

© 2015 Prospect News.
All content on this website is protected by copyright law in the U.S. and elsewhere. For the use of the person downloading only.
Redistribution and copying are prohibited by law without written permission in advance from Prospect News.
Redistribution or copying includes e-mailing, printing multiple copies or any other form of reproduction.