BSC upgrades its credit profile

--Wall Street firms are especially vulnerable to crises of confidence, because they depend on lenders to finance their day-to-day securities trading and other operations. --BSC is reducing its reliance on short term liabilities, such as CP from 21 bil in Jan to 15 bil, so that it wont't risk of being shut off from the loans required to fund trading operations. --company has unused committed secured bank lines that are "of over $11.2 billion, $4 billion of which is available to be drawn on an unsecured basis." --The firm is in a delicate position: It needs to demonstrate to the market that it has a strong, liquid balance sheet without suggesting it is seriously weakened or taking desperate measures to strengthen its balance sheet. --They called it the worst fixed-income markets in 20 years, grouping it with 1987 and the bursting of the Internet bubble --Everybody's waiting for the second, third and twentieth shoe to drop,"