|
| |
|
| NEW YORK,USA (Reuters) — Fitch Ratings on Tuesday became the third agency to downgrade Jamaica’s credit ratings this month, warning the country will likely have to restructure its “unsustainable” debt load.
Delays in negotiating a critical deal with the International Monetary Fund are eroding investor confidence in the country, which remains highly dependent on disbursements from multilateral institutions, Fitch said.
“While the government’s willingness to service its massive debt burden has traditionally been high, its capacity to do so is being seriously jeopardized by the magnitude of the macroeconomic and fiscal shocks the country faces,” Fitch analyst Shelly Shetty said in a statement.
“Limited policy options to meet the fiscal challenges raise the possibility of some form of debt restructuring,” she added.
Fitch cut Jamaica’s long-term foreign- and local-currency debt ratings to CCC from B. It also left them on negative outlook, meaning that further downgrades are possible in the short term.
In the beginning of this month, Standard & Poor’s cut Jamaica’s ratings to CCC from CCC-plus, followed by Moody’s, which downgraded them to Caa1 from B2 last week. |
This entry was posted
on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at 13:08 and is filed under Uncategorized.
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.