The weakest borrowers are repricing while the market sits at a high
Credit is not moving as one thing. The spread on CCC-rated debt sits 8.72 points above the Baa spread as of August 28, 2026, close to the widest reading of 9.05 in a record that FRED serves back to September 2023. Baa itself is at 1.54%, which is tight by the standards of the modern window. The safest tier of corporate credit and the weakest are being priced further apart than at almost any point in the available history.
The equity market is not reflecting it. The S&P 500 finished 1.1% from its own high on the same date, and three of the five widest readings in this series came with the index within 3% of a high. So a wide gap here has not been a reliable warning about stocks. What it does say is that lenders are separating borrowers rather than repricing credit as a class. The series is short, covering less than three years, which is a real limit on any conclusion drawn from it.
Credit Spreads — the live tracker for every rating tier
This chart is a frozen capture — the numbers above are as of Aug 28, 2026 and will not update. The live page recomputes daily from the same dataset. A square version of this chart is available for feeds that crop landscape images.
