Moody’s Earnings Call Insights: Stock Buybacks and European Bank Loans

Moody’s Corporation (NYSE:MCO) recently reported its fourth quarter earnings and discussed the following topics in its earnings conference call.

Stock Buybacks

William Bird – Lazard Capital Markets: Ray, given what your stock is doing, are you likely to front-load stock buybacks this year?

Raymond W. McDaniel Jr. – President and CEO: I think we’re going to have to look at how the stock performs over a bit longer period of time. Our thinking has been to be fairly balanced in our share repurchase throughout the year and we haven’t made any different decision at this point.

William Bird – Lazard Capital Markets: Also, I guess at a higher level, you touched on recent legal development. I was wondering if you could just give kind of your perspective just on how one gets comfortable with recent legal developments

Raymond W. McDaniel Jr. – President and CEO: Well I think the matter that I mentioned in our prepared remarks as far as the Department of Justices’ complaint is, really all I can say is that we are not a party to that and so we are not really able to comment because we don’t have any information other than what is publicly available. I would add that we don’t have any knowledge of any impending complaint by the Department of Justice raising similar claims against Moody’s.