Indonesia wins Moody’s upgrade months after Fitch move

• Indonesia won a sovereign rating upgrade with Moody’s Investors Service raising its assessment to the second-lowest investment grade, months after Fitch Rating lifted its own score.
• The rating on the nation’s long-term, foreign currency-denominated debt was raised one level to Baa2 with a stable outlook, Moody’s said in a statement. The upgrade puts Indonesia on par with the Philippines and India.
• Indonesia’s prudent fiscal and monetary policy and the build-up of financial buffers strengthen Moody’s confidence that its resilience and capacity to respond to shocks has improved, it said. The upgrade would boost President Joko Widodo’s efforts to finance hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure to fire up the economy.
• Moody’s said Indonesia has maintained strict adherence to its fiscal deficit legal limit and that government debt has been low. It forecast the government’s debt to hover around 30% of GDP in the next few years, below the median of 39% for all investment grade sovereigns.
• “This is a near-term positive for markets and a strong validation to Indonesia’s improving fundamentals, putting it in a good position to weather recent external storms,” said Euben Paracuelles, an economist at Nomura Holdings Inc. in Singapore.
• Southeast Asia’s biggest economy has been growing at about 5% and is expected to pick up pace in 2018, but is still well short of the 7% targeted by Widodo, known as Jokowi.

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