Global 2024 Corporate Credit Ratings Outlook: Primarily Stable Despite Uncertain Macroeconomic Challenges

While there is considerable uncertainty around the macroeconomic setting, we have a primarily Stable outlook across our global corporate credit ratings sector coverage for 2024. In this commentary we summarize and explore the key themes across our sector outlooks.

Key Highlights Include:
-- To date, we have published more than 20 individual sector outlooks across our global corporate credit ratings coverage universe, with the vast majority having Stable sector outlooks for 2024.
-- Our outlooks acknowledge the soft macroeconomic backdrop considering the impacts of aggressive interest rate increases, which have not yet been fully felt by economies globally, as well as uncertainties around the pace of disinflation and ultimately interest rate cuts.
-- Our outlooks reflect our view that, absent unforeseen geopolitical or macroeconomic event risks, we believe these challenges are already largely incorporated into our current corporate credit ratings and/or are mostly balanced by considerable mitigants both on an individual issuer and sector-specific level.

“The Stable sector outlooks do not preclude a considerable divergence in individual issuers' credit risk profiles, even within the same sector,” said Moritz Steinbauer, Senior Vice President, Diversified Industries. “This could be based on an individual issuer's operating performance, which may be considerably different than the sector's overall performance and/or because of different effects on issuers depending on where they are located on the investment to non-investment-grade credit risk continuum.”