Compassion is the ability to understand and communicate that we recognize each other as fallible human beings. It means that we understand that people make mistakes, sometimes fail, and do not always live up to their potential or to our expectations. Dealing with our strengths and weaknesses as people and doing so with dignity and respect for others are all part of compassion. When we do not judge others and are sensitive to their situations, we build trust with them, opening the door for them to be honest and straightforward with us.
While candor refers to the accuracy of communication, credibility refers to the intent of the person offering it. A person’s motive for sharing information with you speaks to his credibility.Are his motives self-serving? Is he giving you information to make others look bad? Partners that are not credible limit trust because people must sift through the message to understand the intent. Once partners weaken their credibility, their effectiveness and that of the partnership are severely damaged.
Whenever you move from “I” to “we” in a partnership, trust issues emerge. Unless partners can reach a consensus, they’ll find that power plays, egos, conflicting agendas, and other disruptive dynamics can take over even well-intentioned partnerships and spin them into chaos and dysfunction. Trust is absolutely essential for working through these complex human dynamics.
The majority of price movements that is caused by a rating action is explained by new information which is revealed at the time of the rating action. Typically companies reserve the right to hold back certain information from investors, clients, business partners and competitors. This can be long-term projections, business plans or internal analyses. Usually rating agencies have access to internal documents during their rating process. Therefore, the rating of a company reflects more information than available to the public and to institutional investors such as mutual funds or insurance companies. A rating change itself is therefore an information about a change of a company’s credit quality because it incorporates nonpublic information.
Significant price changes are not only observed after changes of the rating, but also after changes of the rating outlook. In many cases technical factors represent a major reason for bond price changes after a negative rating action. In particular, large price movements can be observed when investment restrictions of institutional investors are triggered by a rating action.
In order to arrive at a rating, one crucial assumption is made: credit worthiness is a stable concept. This means that historical data may be used to transform the information obtained from a company into estimates for default probability and loss severity. Since fundamentals change gradually over time, multinotch rating changes are unlikely. Rating agencies therefore use Outlooks and Watch Lists as leading indicators for potential rating changes. They signal in which direction the next rating step will probably occur. If, for example, a negative outlook is assigned, the rating agency usually defines certain criteria that have to be met by the issuer over a certain period of time, otherwise a rating downgrade can be expected. An example would be that a company must achieve positive free cash flows within a predetermined time-horizon. The failure to do so will result in the loss of the current rating.