October has a spooky reputation in the market. Like the Halloween decorations we’re seeing in neighbors’ yards, scary things always keep popping up. This month is fitting the pattern. From Beijing to Brazil, animal spirits are roiling world markets. With that in mind, we visited last week with two plugged-in observers to get their take…
It was unavoidable, we suppose, that a retired senior bank credit officer would be compelled to respond to our previous column. High debt-to-ebitda leverage, we asserted, was misleading and should be viewed in context of other considerations. Though preferring anonymity, this self-described “credit dinosaur” has been known to us for decades as an experienced participant…
A persistent misunderstanding in leveraged lending is using leverage as the sole metric for market frothiness. Drawing such conclusions is like judging an episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians by the first two minutes. That takes at least three minutes. It’s tempting, of course, to be carried away by the headlines. Both Thomson Reuters…
NASA announced last Friday that Curiosity has finally arrived at its destination. The Martian rover took two years to drive from its landing spot to Mount Sharp – a distance of about ten kilometers – where it will begin the bulk of its scientific experiments. We’ve calculated that this leisurely pace, roughly 0.0003 miles per hour, is…
This first appeared in Middle Market Growth, the official publication of ACG. Randy Schwimmer’s column, MidPoints, is a regular feature there. You can read MMG by clicking on this link. Who invented the airplane? Depends what you mean by “invent.” “Birdmen,” a new book by historian Lawrence Goldstone, describes how the Wright Brothers became so obsessed…
With some anxiety, we watched our five-year-old daughter walk up to the school bus yesterday morning, on her way to the first day of kindergarten. As she climbed aboard, we overheard one of her classmates ask, “Is that your grandfather?” As a pesky questioner ourselves, we admired the young boy’s pluck. Although it injected a…
As we reach our end of August break, it is an annual tradition here at The Lead Left to give readers our recommended summer reading list. Based on our perusal of the best-sellers that went to the beach house in Quogue, or were pool-side at Watch Hill, or on blankets at the Cape, see below for our candidates…
How many readers remember this classic Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello beach party vehicle from 1965? We think any movie with Buster Keaton, Don Rickles, and Linda Evans (as Candy Kane) in the same cast deserves special mention in a summertime column devoted to odd pairings. We also couldn’t help wondering what an updated version of that…
Predictions are tough, especially about the future. And after Thursday’s Dow tumble, it’s hard to dismiss outright doomsday forecasts that a credit apocalypse is coming soon. For leveraged lending bubble busters, their canaries in the capital coal mine are leveraged statistics. Are we past 2007’s high-water mark? To be sure, we’re hearing our share of…
“What’s the definition of an overheated market? One loan and two lenders.” That’s the supply/demand conundrum in the leveraged loan market today. While institutional and retail cash have certainly re-entered the asset class with vigor since the credit crisis, overall levels are not more than those enjoyed during 2007. Indeed, the short-term outlook might see…