News reached us from Mars of the first powered Earth aircraft to fly on another planet. Ingenuity, a helicopter with four foot wide blades (and carrying a small swatch from the original Wright Brothers bi-plane), hovered at ten feet for 30 seconds then came back down. “What the Ingenuity team has done,” a NASA official […]
Leveraged lending is competitive. But it pales in comparison to the 2021 Mrs. Sri Lanka pageant. Reigning Mrs. World champion, Caroline Jurie yanked the tiara off newly-crowned winner Pushpika DeSilva, charging Mrs. DeSilva was not married. Mrs. DeSilva fled the stage in tears. Order was eventually restored. Mrs. DeSilva reclaimed her crown, and Mrs. Jurie […]
By blocking the Suez Canal last month, the Ever Given made headlines, creating a massive shipping traffic jam. Three football fields long and weighing 250 thousand tons (by comparison, the Statue of Liberty is only 125 tons), the monster container vessel is the new global transportation reality: 90% of the world’s goods travel by water. […]
So what happened to CLOs during Covid? When the world stopped last March, as our own CLO manager, Kelli Marti, told us, “everyone looked first to their health of their portfolios. The key was preserving the value of the underlying collateral. “Two things mattered,” she said, “triple-C exposure and OC cushions. If triple-Cs are too […]
“Anytime loan market technicals shift, there’s always a view that CLOs are the end of Western civilization as we know it.” That’s what a top CLO manager told us about his experience over several decades. Regardless of actual performance, CLO’s regularly get hauled out by the media for reckless behavior associated with“risky loans.” Back in […]
Private Credit: views from investors/LP, the opportunities, new entrants, and lessons learned from the pandemic. Churchill’s Co-Head of Senior Lending Randy Schwimmer, Cliffwater’s Head of Capital Markets Fran Beyers, Comvest Partners’ Partner Dan Lee, and Refinitiv’s Head of Market Analysis Ioana Barza share their insights. ▶︎ Watch the full version interview from Opus Connect Webinar: […]
Fran Beyers, Cliffwater’s Head of Capital Markets, Dan Lee, Partner of Comvest, and Randy Schwimmer, Churchill’s Co-Head of Senior Lending discussed what are their biggest fears and surprises in the height of the pandemic and the economic outlook for 2021. ▶︎ Watch the full version interview from Opus Connect Webinar: here
We wrap our special 2021 outlook with private credit. Its value proposition was fully supported last year, coming through the pandemic mostly unscathed. But with conditions becoming more issuer-friendly, how will private credit terms be impacted? When liquid loan yields contract, illiquid loan yields tend to follow. But they carry at least a 100 bp […]
We continue our special series on The Great Reception, a year that’s welcoming all investors. This week we look at the capital markets: funds flow, asset behavior and deal quality. With each passing day, the light at the end of the COVID tunnel grows brighter. That newfound optimism has put upward pressure on interest rates. […]
What have you missed most over the past few months? Well, if you said “Grape-Nuts” we feel your pain. Our beloved cereal has gone missing from supermarket shelves across the US. First produced in 1897 Grape-Nuts accompanied Sir Admiral Byrd to Antarctica and Sir Edmund Hillary to Mount Everest. But don’t worry. They’ll be back. […]