Posts Tagged ‘banking’

Ability to honor

Wednesday, November 11th, 2009

The guarantee effectively shifts the credit risk from the borrower to the guarantor. Where the guarantor is an institution such as an insurance company the value of its guarantees and ability to make them is highly dependent on its credit rating. A bank should never accept a guarantee where the credit rating of the guarantor is lower than that of the borrower.
These cross-border guarantees can also create internal credit problems for the lender where the guarantee is perfectly acceptable and well within the total credit lines authorized for use by the guarantor but the loan breaches head office limits on country exposure. It can be frustrating for bank officers in the international branches of a global bank to have a loan or credit line application from a subsidiary of an American triple-A corporate, and guaranteed by that company, turned down on credit grounds.