Overall credit quality for corporate, sovereign, and banking debt issuers declined only slightly in the third quarter, despite the unusual market conditions in the structured finance market, reports Moody’s Investors Service.

It found that credit rating upgrades fell short of downgrades at a 0.92 ratio during the three months. “The distribution of rating reviews and outlooks has been very stable over the last six quarters,” says Moody’s associate analyst Jennifer Tennant.

Looking ahead, Tennant says the environment continues to be slightly cautious, with a greater percentage of debt issuers on review for downgrade than upgrade, as well as more issuers holding negative rating outlooks than positive ones. Specifically, Moody’s reports that the end of the third quarter, 4% of rated issuers were on review for downgrade, compared with 1.8% on review for upgrade. Similarly, 8.7% of rated issuers had negative outlooks, compared with 6.9% with positive outlooks.

The rating actions, reviews and outlooks also show investment-grade issuers facing a slightly more positive credit outlook than the speculative-grade issuers, continuing a trend from the previous quarter. While both categories had more issuers on review for downgrade than upgrade, the investment grades showed more rating stability during the third quarter, as they saw less frequent downgrades, negative outlook changes, if also upgrades.

The Asia-Pacific and Latin American regions continued to show remarkably strong trends in credit quality, says Moody’s, demonstrating high upgrade-to-downgrade ratios, as well as the quarter ending with more issuers on review for upgrade than for downgrade.

Trends in rating actions by industry also continued to follow the patterns of the previous several quarters. Industries with the greatest rating activity during the third quarter were automotive, consumer products, and health care.