Wall St. holds new captive's AAA rating captive.(Toyota 50)(Toyota Motor Credit Corp.)(Brief article)

Automotive News, October, 2007

After working to get the parent company to sign off on a captive finance company, Toyota Motor Credit Corp. encountered resistance in getting Wall Street to agree on the credit rating of the new entity.

A top AAA rating would improve lending rates, and had symbolic significance for Toyota. Longtime Toyota Motor Credit executive Wolfgang Jahn, 68, recalls the chain of events:

"Anything but a AAA rating was out of the question. It was just not acceptable.

"We were meeting one of the rating agencies, and it was a typical Toyota event. Rather than make formal presentations initially, we wanted to just get to know them. They flatly told us there was no way Toyota would ever get a AAA rating because we don't have any manufacturing facilities in...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.

Premium Content Partnership | HighBeam Research provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.