S&P downgrades major high-street banks
Standard & Poor's (S&P) has downgraded the long-term credit ratings of several banks following changes to its ratings criteria.
The BBC reports: Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup have all been downgraded to A- from A by the rating agency.
Morgan Stanley, Barclays, HSBC, Commerzbank and UBS were also downgraded one notch.
Last month Standard & Poor's mistakenly sent a message to some of its subscribers saying that it had downgraded French debt from its top AAA rating. Both the French market regulator and S&P launched an investigation to see how this could of happened.
2 December 2011