The pension threat to credit quality

As pension accounting clouds traditional balance sheet and liquidity measures, some of the largest issuers in the global corporate markets are presenting an increasingly complicated analytical framework, as Louise Purtle discovers

In the past 12 months corporate analysts, lenders and investors have had much to contend with, operating in an environment where complex and often highly subjective accounting conventions have allowed for, at best, financial obfuscation and, at worst, outright fraud.

The experience, along with the accompanying downgrades and defaults, has heightened the degree of sensitivity to any area of financial reporting where the permissible discretion within the accounting regulations allows for potential