Standard & Poor’s has issued its first rating of a Chinese debt issuer in a debut that raises the pressure on the country’s own rating agencies, said the Financial Times.
US-based S&P became the first and only global rating agency to win a licence to operate in China earlier this year, and on Thursday it awarded a unit of ICBC, the country’s biggest bank, a top-notch rating for domestic RMB-denominated debt.
Investors hope that such assessments will raise standards and transparency to levels acceptable to foreign fund managers, as government-linked bonds are being woven into global benchmarks, potentially triggering trillions of dollars of inflows.