Standard&Poor's Ratings Services has found that its outlooks and CreditWatch listings on sovereign ratings have been useful indicators of future rating actions. Since we began assigning outlooks to our ratings in 1989, we have never lowered a sovereign rating with a positive outlook. On the other hand, we have raised 160 out of 224 sovereign ratings with positive outlooks. (The ratings we refer to throughout this article are long-term foreign-currency sovereign credit ratings.) Similarly, we have raised only one sovereign rating with a negative outlook, and we have lowered 146 out of 257 sovereign ratings with negative outlooks. Of the ratings on CreditWatch with negative implications, we have lowered 74 out of 111. We found that historically we
