Kamakura Troubled Company Index Shows Continued Improvement in Credit Quality in July

Kamakura Corporation announced Tuesday that the Kamakura index of troubled public companies improved again in July, falling 0.58% to 9.63%. The index has now improved in 13 of the past 15 months. Kamakura’s index had reached a recent peak of 24.3% in March, 2009. Kamakura defines a troubled company as a company whose short term default probability is in excess of 1%. Credit conditions in July were better than credit conditions in 72.4 percent of the months since the index’s initiation in January 1990. The index is 3.98 percentage points better than the index’s historical average of 13.61%.  The all-time low in the index was 5.40%, recorded on May 11, 2006, while the all-time high in the index was 28.0%, recorded on September 28, 2001. The index is based on default probabilities for more than 29,200 companies in 33 countries. 

In July, the percentage of the global corporate universe with default probabilities between 1% and 5% was 6.55%, a decline of 51 basis points. The percentage of companies with default probabilities between 5% and 10% was 1.50%, a decrease of 7 basis points.  The percentage of the universe with default probabilities between 10 and 20% was 0.91% of the universe, down 6 basis points, while the percentage of companies with default probabilities over 20% was 0.67% of the total universe in July, an increase of 6 basis points. 

David Boldon, Washington DC representative for Kamakura Corporation, said Friday, “Corporate credit quality has improved so dramatically over the last 15 months that only 5 companies, shown in the following chart, had increases in their one month default probabilities of more than 80 basis points. Of these firms, only YRC Worldwide showed a 1 month default probability of more than 300 basis points.”