Risky banking?

Most people's reaction to the news that the Chittenden Bank will be sold to People's United Bank of Connecticut will be to ask whether there will be job cuts in Vermont.  I'm more curious about a different issue, which was only briefly referenced in the Free Press article on the sale:   

Global credit rating firm Fitch Ratings reported that it does not intend to cut the "BBB" credit rating of People's United, however Chittenden Corp.'s "A-" credit rating was put on watch status. The combined bank will likely be less creditworthy than Chittenden as an independent company.

I'll ignore the run on sentence (I'm used to it coming from my students at UVM, but expect more from a newspaper).  People's has a BBB rating.  That's just one step up from junk bond status.  If I was the reporter writing the story, I would have asked a lot of questions about the bond rating.  Why the BBB status?  Is that higher or lower than it has been in the past?  Why?  What kinds of assets are in its portfolio?  What factors have caused the bond rating to be so low?  Is People's buying Chittenden to boost its asset quality or for other reasons?

Of course, future media reporting will no doubt focus on the number of jobs that will be lost as a result of the merger, but a healthy economy is not about jobs per se, it's about jobs that create value.