Winter Games (Second of Two Parts)

We tend to be a late adopter of cultural phenomena, so our appreciation of curling was understandably delayed. A sport that plays like shuffleboard, tosses around terms like hack and hog line, and employs practitioners who carry brooms, is a tough sell.

But thanks to relentless Olympic coverage, the US men winning a first-time ever gold medal (“Miracurl on Ice”), and a certain fascination with the South Korean women’s team, your correspondent is now all-in on the “roaring game.” Go Garlic Girls!

Speaking of double take-outs, we return our attention to Proskauer’s Private Credit Insights. As we discussed last week, the firm reviewed covenant, pricing, and documentation trends from its 2017 data base of 203 (mostly) sponsored deals.

Besides the standard covenant-lite and covenant-loose occurences, Proskauer’s Stephen Boyko also noted how higher leverage was infiltrating credit structures. In documentation this was reflected in a number of ways.

Take ebitda definitions. In 62% of the cases, lenders imposed caps on non-recurring expenses (rising to 70% for companies with ebitda less than $50 million). When applied, this cap amounted to an average of 20-24.9% of those expenses.