Media

Private Credit Myths: Introduction

A Dartmouth College professor has found that middle age is even more depressing than we thought. But things start looking up pretty quickly after that. In a recently published study, David Blanchflower found unhappiness is a U-shaped curve, bottoming out when people are 47.2 years old. But after that, people start feeling better. By the […]

2020 Hindsight in Leveraged Loans

Remember your summer internships in high school? Neither do we.   Wolf Cukier’s stint at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center last summer could have been equally forgetful. The Scarsdale, NY teenager began it by searching for anomalous star patterns amid reams of satellite data.   On his third day he noted an odd image near […]

Private Credit: “Still the Best Place to Be”

Investors today are faced with mixed signals. November’s impressive labor report of 266,000 job gains went a long way to easing fears of an imminent recession. But with buoyant markets brought fresh bubble fears: Are prices overinflating? Are valuations headed for a bigger fall down the road? And won’t terms and structures continue to weaken […]

Private Credit Risk: Where Are We Now?

As a long-term participant in the #CreditMarkets, we’ve learned the most intriguing times are not when things are going swimmingly for issuers or investors. Life is becomes interesting when trends begin to shift, at the inflection points. These are often apparent only in hindsight. The Great Recession, for example, ended in June, 2009 – barely […]

The Costs of Senior Stretch and Unitranche

“Where to draw the line is also key as we examine #SeniorStretch and #unitranche loans. Besides leverage and loan-to-value, yield is helpful in identifying these financings. Unitranche is a one-stop solution blending senior and junior tranches into one. With more than thirty unitranche suppliers out there, leverage and pricing reflect competition among those firms, rather […]

Where’s the Line Between Senior Stretch and Unitranche?

This week we fearlessly tackle one of the most frequently asked questions in private credit: Namely, where do you draw the line between a #SeniorStretch loan and a #Unitranche? It’s a topic that’s gained increasing traction as issuer leverage has risen steadily, going back well before the financial crisis. Back in the early 2000’s when […]

The Haves and Have-Nots in Leveraged Loans

Issuers in leveraged lending today are divided into three categories: the haves, the have-nots, and the wish-they-hads. With about six weeks of business left to the year, the differences between haves and have-nots is growing. In the #BroadlySyndicatedMarket, the combination of triple-C anxiety among CLO managers and cash out-flow worries with retail funds have impelled […]

The Truth Behind Loan Stats

Tracking data in the capital markets is often a challenge. There are lies, damnable lies, and leveraged loan statistics. But when a lot of metrics point in the same direction, truth is buried there somewhere. Such is the case with data showing both M&A and related loan volume slumped for the third quarter, large and […]