How can I find out the credit rating of a company
You can view Standard & Poor's credit ratings here:  http://www.standardandpoors.com/ratings/en/us/ You have to register with S&P to access the ratings. Dunn & Bradstreet offers detailed credit reports on businesses.  They are not cheap, but they appear to have information on RIOCAN.
You really can't. Credit rating is determined by financial history, and until your kids are old enough to legally sign a contract they have essentially no financial history. Interesting out-of-the-box thought, but not workable. The cold caller is just a different way to contact you compared to the junk mail that they send. The business  gets information from the credit rating companies for households that meet a specific set of criteria. It could be town, age, home ownership, low credit utilization...Or the exact opposite depending on what they are selling. Some business do sell your data. Grocery store know who buys certain products: parents buying diapers may want to start saving for college; ones buying acne medicine may want to talk about lower rates for car insurance.  When they call via phone they have a different success rate compared to junk mail, but for that business that may be acceptable for their needs. "The list of the public companies is available on the regulatory agencies' sites usually (for example, in the US, you can look at SEC filings). Otherwise, you can check the stock exchange listings, which show all the public companies traded on that exchange. The shareholders, on the other hand, are normally not listed and not published. You'll have to ask the company, and it probably won't tell you (and won't even know them all as many shares are held in the ""street name"" of the broker)." Even assuming you were reading the balance sheet correctly it means nothing. What banks mostly care about is cash flow.  Do they have enough extra money to make the payments on whatever they borrow? I have never had a credit card company ask me about assets--they don't care.  They care about income with which to pay the credit card bill. Have a solid record of paying your bills and enough income to pay back what you are trying to borrow and you'll have an excellent credit rating no matter what your net worth.  Whether you are one person or a megacorporation makes no difference. "I used to work for one of the three ratings agencies. Awhile ago. First: There are lots of different ratings. The bulk of ratings are for corporate debt and public finance. So senior debentures (fixed income) and General Obligations e.g. tax-free muni bonds, respectively. Ratings agencies are NOT paid by the investment banks, they are paid by the corporations  or city/ state that is issuing debt. The investment banks are the syndicate that pulls the transaction together and brings it to market.  For mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt CDO-CLO's, all of which are fancy structured securitizations, well, that is a different matter! Those  transactions are the ones where there is an inappropriately close tie between the investment bankers and ratings agencies. And those were the ratings that blew out and caused problems.  Ratings agencies continued to do a decent job with what WAS their traditional business, corporate and municipal bond ratings, as far as I know.   What khajja said was 100% correct: S&amp;P's fees were paid by investors, the people who were purchasing the bonds, until about 50 years ago. Around the same time that McGraw-Hill purchased S&amp;P, in 1966, they departed from that model, and started charging the bond issuers for ratings. I don't know if that decision was driven by McGraw-Hill or not, though.  One more thing: Not all credit ratings agencies are paid by the issuers. One of the 10 NRSRO's (a designation given by the S.E.C.) is Egan-Jones. Their revenue comes from the investors, bond purchasers, not the companies issuing bonds, unlike the S&amp;P/ Fitch/ Moody's ""business model"". So there is an alternative, which I consider hopeful and reason not to totally despair.  EDIT: What xcrunna19 mentions is also totally accurate. The part about Nouriel Roubini (who is a professor at N.Y.U. or Columbia or such and a sensible though slightly high strung sort) is consistent with my impression. As for whether it would require government action to implement the changes advocated by Roubini, yes, I guess it would, but I don't know if the government would do that. It would be better if the credit ratings agencies would find their own way to a different, less conflicted payment-incentive model.  Keep in mind too that many of the provisions of Dodd-Frank have removed the existing regulatory requirements for credit ratings on bonds and other securities. This is the scary part though: There isn't anything to replace the credit ratings agencies, not at the moment, as far as I can tell! Eventually the government is supposed to come up with an alternative, but that hasn't happened yet. Which is better: Not requiring ratings at all, or the past situation of sometimes inflated ratings, which imparted a false sense of confidence? I don't know." In general you cannot. Once the security is no longer listed on the exchange - it doesn't have to provide information to the exchange and regulators (unless it wants to be re-listed). That's one of the reasons companies go private - to keep their (financial and other) information private. If it was listed in 1999, and is no longer listed now - you can dig through SEC archives for the information. You can try and reach out to the company's investors' relations contact and see if they can help you with the specific information you're looking for. "The mathematics site, WolframAlpha, provides such data. Here is a link to historic p/e data for Apple. You can chart other companies simply by typing ""p/e code"" into the search box.  For example, ""p/e XOM"" will give you historic p/e data for Exxon. A drop-down list box allows you to select a reporting period : 2 years, 5 years, 10 years, all data.  Below the chart you can read the minimum, maximum, and average p/e for the reporting period in addition to the dates on which the minimum and maximum were applicable." I've seen this tool.  I'm just having a hard time finding where I can just get a list of all the companies.    For example, you can get up to 100 results at a time, if I just search latest filings for 10-K.  This isn't really an efficient way to go about what I want. It seems like you want to compare the company's values not necessarily the stock price.  Why not get the total outstanding shares and the stock price, generate the market cap.  Then you could compare changes to market cap rather than just share price. "is your credit history ruined, or merely dinged? Is the blow   recoverable? Any bad credit rating event is recoverable given enough time / money to solve the problem.  As far as ""Ruined"" vs"" ""Dinged"", well, that's a matter of opinion; some people think that one bad item is the end of the world, others not so much.  You will have an unpaid debt listed on your report.  This will drop your score.  The amount it impacts the score will depend on other factors in your report. Can the carrier try to get the money back in court? I assume you'll   wind up dealing with a debt collector.  Yes they could go to court, but that's unlikely at least in the short term.  Far more likely is that the debt ends up sold to a debt collection agency for pennies on the dollar.  The debt collection agency will harass you until you pay and they might file in court if they think the debt is more than enough to cover the court costs. Will this affect any other relationships you have? Possibly.  A bad rating may make it more difficult to get credit in the future.  However that depends on numerous other factors such as your entire history.  It could even prevent you from being hired from certain jobs - not many of them, but some.   Is it criminal? Read this: http://www.startribune.com/investigators/95692619.html  The US does NOT have a debtors prison.  However if the company decides to file a court case and you fail to appear or fail to abide by the court ruling then, in some states, you could be committing a crime and may be thrown in jail.  At which point you are on the hook not just for the original fee but potentially a plethora of other costs.  Never mind the loss of reputation when your friends, family and coworkers find out that you are sitting in jail. At the end of the day, just pay the debt.  If you agreed to the plan and the plan has an early cancellation fee then the moral and ethical thing to do is pay it.  Trying to see how bad it would be to ignore it isn't the right way to live." The only recommendation I have is to try the stock screener from Google Finance : https://www.google.com/finance?ei=oJz9VenXD8OxmAHR263YBg#stockscreener I've seen credit cards that provide you your credit score for free, updated once a month and even charted over the last year.  Unfortunately the bank I used to have this card with was bought and the purchasing bank discontinued the feature. Perhaps someone out there knows of some cards that still offer a feature like this? Credit Sesame monitors your credit score for free.  My understanding is that they make their money off of credit card referrals. "In one personal finance book I read that if a company is located in a country with credit rating X it can't have credit rating better (lower - i.e. further from AAA level) than X. This is simply wrong. Real world evidence proves it wrong. Automatic Data Processing (ADP), Exxon Mobile (XOM), Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), and Microsoft (MSFT) all have a triple-A rating today, even though the United States doesn't. Toyota (TM) remained triple-A for many years even after Japanese debt was downgraded. The explanation was the following: country has rating X because risk of doing business with it is X and so risk of doing business with any company located in that country automatically can't be better than X. When reading financial literature, you should always be critical. Let's evaluate this statement. First off, a credit rating is not the ""risk of doing business."" That is way too generic. Specifically, a credit rating attempts to define an individual or company's ability to repay it's obligations. Buying treasuries constitutes as doing business with the gov't, but you can argue that buying stamps at USPS is also doing business with the gov't, and a credit rating won't affect the latter too much.  So a credit rating reflects the ability of an entity to repay it's obligations. What does the ability of a government to repay have to do with the ability of companies in that country to repay? Not much. Certainly, if a company keeps it's surplus cash all in treasuries, then downgrading the government will affect the company, but in general, the credit rating of a company determines the company's ability to pay." Google Finance gives you this information.