This week we acquainted ourselves with fun facts about solar eclipses. One is the fortuitousness of size and distance. If the Moon was slightly smaller or further away from Earth, there would be no totality. This coincidence is also impermanent. Apparently, the Moon is creeping away from our planet at the rate of 1.5 inches…
Last Thursday was opening day for MLB, a hopeful sign of spring. Catching up on some interesting 2023 statistics from our national pastime, we noted that Luis Arráez of the Miami Marlins won the NL batting championship with a .354 average. Astonishingly, this was Arráez’s second consecutive title. He topped the AL in 2022 with…
While private credit is growing in popularity with both investors and issuers, banks are seen to be struggling with the new order. While arguing for more non-bank regulation to Congress and federal agencies, they are busy trying to start their own direct lending businesses or partnering with established firms. Given the challenges of holding leveraged…
Now that the liquid loan market is opening, albeit with mostly refinancings, larger issuers have more choices. This is actually a good and natural thing. For those companies willing to go through the ratings and syndication processes in the bank market, terms can be competitive. Because CLO equity investors benefit from much higher structural leverage,…
Readers of The Lead Left will be familiar with our impatience for the “sky-is-falling” brand of financial industry reporting (“risky loans!”). Recent news articles have further tested us. There’s plenty of room for well-researched pieces about real risks associated with leveraged lending and sponsor buyouts. Indeed, these can be valuable by highlighting managers whose practices…
To understand the dynamics of buyout finance today, you need to appreciate the difference in what drives the public credit markets versus private credit. The biggest change since the GFC has been the shift away from the investment banking model. For both corporates and private equity-backed deals, borrowers often relied on investment banks to advise…
We were perusing recently a piece on the future of private equity in an excellent state of the market study from Evercore’s private funds group. One of the paragraph section subtitles read: “The corporate governance fix that became an asset class.” The thesis was that private equity sponsors solve strategic problems for growing (or challenged)…
It is a measure of the impact the GFC had on regulators, financial policy makers, and the capital markets that faith in systemic liquidity is now a foundational principle. We saw that confidence further underlined as the economy emerged intact from the global pandemic. And supported as well by the patience shown by financial markets…
A recent report from KBRA’s research team (“Private Credit: 2024 Maturity Wall is a Myth”) outlined three conditions that need to exist for looming maturities “to present a challenge to the industry.” First, there have to be a “significant” number of maturities coming up. Second, if lenders have to take losses as a result of…
There are a few things about leveraged loans that create anxiety among those less familiar with the workings of that market. One is systemic risk. The other is leverage itself (“risky loans!”). Banks underwriting loans and getting stuck holding them was a concern before the GFC. Since then, regulators have helped shift loans to private…