Credit - The Departed

"Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens." -  J. R. R. Tolkien 

We have long posited that by suppressing interest rates through ZIRP, the Fed has allowed risks to be "mis-priced" leading to global aggressive "mis-allocation" of capital in the search for returns. This week's chosen title is not only a reference to departing Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, but as well a reference to Martin Scorsese movie masterpiece "The Departed". In the final scene, a rat is seen on the window ledge, symbolizing according to Scorsese "the quest for the rat", which we can ascertain today in the strong sense of distrust towards the actions of the US central bank and in relation to our chosen analogy. We could ramble further and quote Don Delillo's 2003 Cosmopolis: "A rat became the unit of currency".

Under Ben Bernanke's guidance, there has been a growing disconnect between Wall Street and Main Street as displayed by Bank of America Merrill Lynch graph displaying the evolution of Wall Street versus Main Street:

From its 2009 lows the US economy has grown by $1.3 trillion while the US stock market has grown by $12.0 trillion.

No doubt to us that the 2013 performance of the US stock market has been artificially "boosted" by "de-equitization", namely the reduction of the number of shares courtesy of buybacks thanks to increase leverage given many corporates have issued bonds to finance their buybacks program as displayed by the graph below displaying the growing divergence between the S&P 500 and trailing PE since January 2012  - graph source Bloomberg:

 The S&P 500 trades at 25x cyclically adjusted PE ratio (CAPE), exceeding the highs reached in 1901 and 1966. In 1929 CAPE reached 33x and in 2000 44x. 

Our "Departed" strategy has relied heavily on the "Cantillon Effects". The rise of the Fed's Balance sheet coincided with the rise of the S&P 500, and boosted as well by the rise of buybacks. The greatest failure of "the Departed" can be clearly seen in the fall in the US labor participation rate (inversely plotted) - source Bloomberg:

In red: the Fed's balance sheet

In dark blue: the S&P 500
In light blue: S&P 500 buybacks
In purple: NYSE Margin debt
In green: inverse US labor participation rate.

What the "Departed" aka Ben Bernanke as achieved is as follows:

More liquidity = greater economic instability once QE ends

No surprise therefore that the $4 trillion of flows which have been going towards Emerging Markets have been impacted by the return of US rates into positive real yields territory as we have argued in our conversation "Osmotic pressure" back in August 2013:

"The effect of ZIRP has led to a "lower concentration of interest rates levels" in developed markets (negative interest rates). In an attempt to achieve higher yields, hot money rushed into Emerging Markets causing "swelling of returns" as the yield famine led investors seeking higher return, benefiting to that effect the nice high carry trade involved thanks to low bond volatility." - Macronomics, 24th of August 2013

The mechanical resonance of bond volatility in the bond market in 2013 started the biological process of the buildup in the "Osmotic pressure" we discussed at the time:

"In a normal "macro" osmosis process, the investors naturally move from an area of low solvency concentration (High Default Perceived Potential), through capital flows, to an area of high solvency concentration (Low Default Perceived Potential). The movement of the investor is driven to reduce the pressure from negative interest rates on returns by pouring capital on high yielding assets courtesy of low rates volatility and putting on significant carry trades, generating osmotic pressure and "positive asset correlations" in the process. Applying an external pressure to reverse the natural flow of capital with US rates moving back into positive real interest rates territory, thus, is reverse "macro" osmosis we think. Positive US real rates therefore lead to a hypertonic surrounding in our "macro" reverse osmosis process, therefore preventing Emerging Markets in stemming capital outflows at the moment."

Of course, what we are seeing right now in Emerging Markets is the continuation of "reverse osmosis".

So in this week's conversation, we will look at the growing downside risk posed by some Emerging Markets, the implication for European stocks, and our growing uneasiness with the credit risks being taken and the deflation build-up we are seeing.

We already discussed EM troubles brewing in our conversation "Misstra Know-it-all" relating to the great work from Ben Bernanke aka "The Departed":

"Of course given volatility is on the rise and that VaR (Value at risk) has risen sharply from a risk management perspective, re-calibrating risk exposure could indeed accentuate the on-going pressure of reducing exposure to Emerging Markets, triggering to that affect additional outflows in difficult illiquid markets to make matters worse."

And as posited by Nomura at the time of our September 2013, the risk of the situation turning nasty for lack of liquidity is significant:

"Bad liquidity markets saw asset swaps widen considerably (making swap paying less of a hedge) and start to trade like credit products. This phenomenon, if it continues, could result in a lot of proxy hedging through FX, FX vol, buying CDS and, at a more serious stage, selling what investors could unwind."

We also added at the time:

"Misstra Know-it'all has indeed played a quick hand, lifting stock prices, playing on the wealth effect game and exporting "hot money" flows in Emerging Markets"

In the same conversation we also indicated an interesting trade we particularly like and enjoy today:

"If the policy compass is spinning and there’s no way to predict how governments will react, you don’t know whether to hedge for inflation or deflation, so you hedge for both. By put-call parity, if there is huge volatility in the policy responses of governments, the option-value of both gold and bonds goes up." - David Goldman's article about Gold and Treasuries and bonds in general written in August 2011 (the former global head of fixed income research for Bank of America)

This is exactly what is happening at the moment from a tactical point of view we think and at least the gold leg of the put-call parity, has indeed been performing in this fashion year to date while Emerging Markets currencies have been on the receiving end of the sell-off - graph source Bloomberg:

Interestingly, when it comes to Japan and the crowded trade in JPY (which we have been playing since late 2012) appears to us overly crowded and the risk of a strong reversal cannot be ignored anymore, making as well the Nikkei vulnerable in the short-term (we admitted in 2013 that we enjoyed being long Nikkei hedged in Euro). The USD/JPY exchange rate, the Nikkei index and the credit risk Itraxx Japan CDS spread (inverted) - source Bloomberg:

When it comes to credit and spread tightening, the above significant correlation between rising equities and tighter credit spreads is clearly explained by the wealth effect induced by the Japanese QE.

But, the recent rise in the Nikkei 3 month 100% Moneyness Implied Volatility could indicate a potential near term rise in the Itraxx Japan, representative of the credit risk perception for corporate Japan. It has stayed at record low levels for many months and could easily climb back towards the 100 bps level we think - graph source Bloomberg:

Given the recent bout of volatility, which has been caused from the "Great Rotation" from Emerging Markets aka the "Tourist Trap" (a tourist trap being an establishment, that has been created or re-purposed with the aim of "attracting tourists" and their money), when it comes to playing "defense", Consumer staples offer partial crash protection. On that subject see our April 2013 post - "Equities, playing defense - Consumer staples, an embedded free "partial crash" put option".  From a contrarian stand-point, Consumer Staples, as displayed by Bank of America Merrill Lynch January 2014 Long & Shorts summary, appears extremely underweight:

When it comes to equities and credit sensitivity to Emerging Markets turmoil, Europe is more sensitive to China/EM weakness as indicated by the below chart from Bank of America Merrill Lynch from their note from the 25th of January entitled "Love EM or Hate EM" displaying the massive underperformance in Europe main investment grade risk perception indicator namely Itraxx Main (125 European investment grade entities):

We already touched on the sensitivity of equity index earnings versus FX sensitivity on the 21st of March 2013 in our conversation "Have Emerging Equities been the victim of currency wars?":
"For some countries, the major equity indices can be much more heavily affected by foreign earnings than by domestic earnings." - source BNP Paribas

No wonder the IBEX is on clearly on the receiving end of the latest sell-off. In similar fashion peripheral issuers such as Santander, Mapfre and BBVA in the credit space have not been spared either. The underperformance of the IBEX - graph source - stockcharts.com:

Credit wise, "The Departed" has indeed pushed "mis-allocation" to deep instability level, you would have thought the prime role of a central bank was financial stability, but then again, looking at the recent developments, one might wonder about the "unintended consequences" which increased the instability of the system were worth the efforts put on in over-reflating financial markets.

Recent examples abound to show the increasing risks taken by brazen investors moving clearly outside there comfort zone.

For instance investors are dipping their toes back into illiquid investments as reported by Lisa Abramowicz in Bloomberg on the 23rd of January 2013 in her article "Hard-To-Sell Junk Debt Lure Oaktree to JP Morgan":
"Bond investors are losing their aversion to difficult-to-trade corporate debt that handed them some of the biggest losses in the credit crisis.
The extra yield note buyers demand to own older, smaller junk bonds that trade infrequently has shrunk to an average 0.25 percentage point this month from more than 1 percentage point a year ago, according to Barclays Plc data. JPMorgan Chase & Co. money manager Jim Shanahan said he’s preferring “good credit quality and less liquidity” when picking bonds, while Howard Marks, the head of distressed debt investor Oaktree Capital Group LLC, said he’s finding bigger potential gains in private, less-traded debt.
The evaporating premium for illiquid assets is showing the depths to which money managers are reaching to boost returns after a five-year rally that pushed relative yields on junk bonds to the least since August 2007. With Federal Reserve monetary policies suppressing interest-rate benchmarks for a sixth year, credit buyers are showing more concern that they’ll miss out on a continued rally than get stuck with debt that lost 26 percent during the market seizure in 2008.
“For the past several years, people have been concerned about liquidity,” said Eric Gross, a credit strategist at Barclays in New York. “Now we’re hearing more about people seeking out illiquid bonds.”

Fragile Market

Such debt tends to be more vulnerable to price swings when market sentiment deteriorates, because there are fewer buyers to bid on it when investor withdrawals force money managers to sell. Those risks intensified after stricter banking rules accelerated a pullback by Wall Street dealers that used their own money to facilitate trading.
Primary dealers that trade directly with the Fed cut their holdings of corporate bonds by 76 percent to $56 billion after peaking at $235 billion in 2007, Fed data through March show. After the central bank changed the way it reported the holdings in April, net speculative-grade bond holdings fell as much as 24 percent to a low of $5.63 billion in May before rising to $7.7 billion on Jan. 8.
Investors are demanding an average yield of 5.94 percent to own bonds sold at least 18 months ago in batches of less than $250 million, Barclays data show. That compares with an average 5.7 percent for newer debt offerings of at least $500 million.
The gap, which averaged 0.5 percentage point last year and 0.92 percentage point in 2012, reached as much as 1.95 percentage points at the peak of the financial crisis in March 2009."  - source Bloomberg.

Just a thought for our confident credit investors:
"Liquidity is a backward-looking yardstick. If anything, it’s an indicator of potential risk, because in “liquid” markets traders forego trying to determine an asset’s underlying worth - - they trust, instead, on their supposed ability to exit."
Roger Lowenstein, author of “When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management.” - "Corzine Forgot Lessons of Long-Term Capital"

Another example as well to the extreme the "Departed" has pushed investors is the return of the old credit binge instruments such as "PIKs" bonds (Payment in Kind) as discussed by Sarika Gangar in Bloomberg on the 24th of January in her article "No-interest Junk Bonds Make Comeback With Twist":
"The riskiest types of corporate bonds are getting a makeover, providing more protection for investors while showing the limits of a rally in junk-rated debt that pushed yields to a record low.
Issuers from Neiman Marcus Group Ltd., which sold $600 million of notes in October that allow it to make interest payments in more debt instead of cash, to Jacksonville, Florida-based Bi-Lo Holdings LLC led $14.8 billion of payment-in-kind offerings in the U.S. last year, the most since 2008, according to data compiled by Bloomberg and Fitch Ratings. The 36 issues were a record.
While the bonds became popular during the last credit boom before the downturn, the new generation of securities are smaller in size, come from companies with less leverage and some compel borrowers to pay interest in cash unless they violate certain financial targets. These protections show that investors are treading carefully even as they search for additional yield amid unprecedented central bank stimulus measures that pushed interest rates to all-time lows.
“The issuance of PIK tends to move the same way as the credit cycle and credit has been loosening,” Sharon Bonelli, a managing director at Fitch in New York, said in a telephone interview. Still, “the market is not as aggressive as it was.” Sales of PIK-bonds were the third most on record last year, behind the $16.2 billion in 2007 and $14.9 billion in 2008." - source Bloomberg.

Kuddos to the "Departed", the Fed's ZIRP since 2008 has forced investors into riskier securities to get extra payouts. But, there is a catch we have repeatedly pointed out:
Definition of Credit Market insanity - "Any statistician will tell you, a good outcome for a bad risk doesn't mean the risk wasn't bad; it just means you happened to get lucky."

When it comes to credit risk and luck, recently some investors in hybrid securities learned the hard way when ArcelorMittal called early some subordinated bonds at 101 when they had been trading recently around 108.96 cents, a good sucker punch for some unwary investors as indicated by Alastair March in Bloomberg on the 21st of January in his article entitled "Arcelor Mittal's Hybrid Bonds Slump on Early Redemption Call":
"ArcelorMittal’s $650 million of hybrid bonds slumped 6.8 percent after the steelmaker said it would redeem the notes early because of changes to the way the securities are treated by Moody’s Investors Service.
ArcelorMittal will buy back the subordinated securities on Feb. 20 and pay investors 101 percent of their principal, the Luxembourg-based company said in a statement. The notes, which combine elements of debt and equity, were trading at 101.55 cents on the dollar at 11:05 a.m. in London after closing on Friday at 108.96 cents. Moody’s said on July 31 that it would consider hybrids of speculative-grade companies to be entirely debt, rather than half equity as is now the case for all issuers. ArcelorMittal’s move to call the securities early “shocked the market” and highlights the vulnerability of hybrid bonds to ratings changes, ING Groep NV analysts led by Mark Harmer wrote in a note to investors." - source Bloomberg

When the facts change, which they did in July last year, as a credit investor, change your facts or face the consequences.

We are nearing a top in the gentle credit cycle and no doubt there will be a second distressed wave in the not so distant future, rest assured.

This is what Bethany McLean, known for her work on the Enron scandal and the 2008 financial crisis, wrote back in 2011 - Corporate Subprime - The default crisis that never happened:
"Armageddon never arrived. The Federal Reserve slashed interest rates, helping to spark a huge rebound in the price of risky debt. According to S&P, during the past five years cov-lite debt returned a total of 33 percent, versus 31 percent for standard loans with covenants. Companies that were running into trouble were able to raise more money in the markets. Corporate default rates stayed very low. And it all happened so quickly that the protection afforded by the covenants, or the lack thereof, never seriously got tested." - Bethany McLean - The default crisis that never happened.

She also added in her 2011article:
"The fact that the Fed rode to the rescue doesn't necessarily mean that cov-lite loans were a good risk to begin with."

Another interesting development in the desperate search for yields at any risk by credit investors, has been in the the speculative loan space as indicated by Sridhar Natarajan in Bloomberg on the 22nd of January in his article "Loan Surge Above Par Putting Investors at Risk":
"More speculative-grade U.S. loans are trading above par than at any time since May, exposing investors who are funneling record amounts of cash into the debt to greater risks as rising prices encourage borrowers to refinance at lower interest rates. 
Spanish-language broadcaster Univision Communications Inc. and KKR & Co.-controlled First Data Corp. are among at least 30 companies seeking to reduce rates on $31 billion of bank debt as more than 80 percent of leveraged-loan prices exceed 100 cents on the dollar, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co. That’s up from 40 percent at the beginning of October, according to a report from the New York-based lender last week. “Loans are trading well above their call prices because the investor community is reaching out for existing loans, "Jonathan Kitei, head of U.S. loan distribution at Barclays Plc in New York, said in a telephone interview. “You will see more loans getting repriced.”
Investors last year deposited about $63 billion into loan funds that invest in debt with rates that rise with benchmarks and have limited restrictions on early repayment. Banks from Barclays Plc to JPMorgan and Citigroup Inc. expect loans to underperform compared with 2013 as the Federal Reserve begins to taper its bond purchases, paving the way for an increase in rates that have been kept near zero for the last five years.

Limited ‘Protection’

“Whenever loans are trading above par, you introduce an additional risk element as there is limited call protection,” David Breazzano, president of DDJ Capital Management LLC, which manages more than $7 billion in high yield assets, said in a telephone interview. “Value in loans has dissipated a bit in the last couple of months.” Companies reduced borrowing costs on $281 billion of speculative-grade loans last year, or almost 4 times more than 2012, according to Standard & Poor’s Capital IQ Leveraged Commentary and Data." - source Bloomberg.

The divergence of growth between the US economy and the European economy has been indeed reflected in credit prices such as the US leveraged loan cash price index versus its European peer. - source Bloomberg:

While both the PMIs and Leveraged loan prices cratered in 2008, you can see the impressive rebound in 2009, leading in the rapid surge in cash prices for leveraged loans and the increasing divergence in cash prices as indicated by the growing spread between US leveraged loan prices and European leveraged loan prices now at only 3 points apart.

The divergence of loan growth has indeed explained the divergence of economic expansion between Europe and the US. The divergence between US and European PMI indexes - source Bloomberg:

The growth differential between both economies is due to credit conditions. You can clearly notice the uncanning similarity with leveraged loans prices in both regions.

Moving on to the growing deflationary risk we have been warning about for some time, Europe seems indeed to be sleepwalking into a deflationary trap as pointed at recently by Christopher Woods from CLSA in his recent Greed & Fear note:
"At some point the equity market must surely focus on the reality that this market action reflects an increasingly deflationary environment in the Eurozone which is fundamentally equity negative. In this respect it is worth noting that 20% of the items in the Eurozone’s CPI inflation basket are now in deflation, with an average 2.2%YoY decline in December, contributing a negative 45bps to the Eurozone CPI inflation." - CLSA, Christopher Woods

Europe is indeed turning Japanese. It's D,  D for deflation. German 2 year notes versus Japan 2 year notes going down again and indicative of the deflationary forces at play we have been discussing over and over again - source Bloomberg:

In similar fashion to QE2, QE3 triggered a significant rise in Inflation Expectations, since the beginning of the year, 5 year forward breakeven rates have been falling, indicative of the strength of the deflationary forces at play - source Bloomberg

Every time over the past several years when inflation expectations have eased significantly stocks have declined and credit spreads widened meaningfully.

Another sign of the many failures of the "Departed": Inflation is nowhere to be seen but in rising asset prices, which are more and more grossly disconnected from reality. QE was supposed to create inflation. It hasn't been the kind of inflation the "Departed" was hoping for.

On a final note, of course one of the main culprits in 2013 which we have discussed at length has been Japan which has been exporting deflation on a large scale and the US has not been immune. It is still the "D" world (Deflation - Deleveraging). On that point we agree with Albert Edwards from Société Générale on the deflation risk, as displayed in a recent Chart of the Day graph from Bloomberg:

"The CHART OF THE DAY shows annual rates of inflation excluding food and energy, based on indicators that Edwards cited in a similar chart two days ago. It tracks the monthly changes in a consumer-spending deflator compiled by the U.S. Commerce Department and a price index from Eurostat.
The U.S. deflator rose 1.1 percent for the 12 months ended in November. The increase was smaller than the 1.7 percent gain for the core consumer price index that month, which was matched in December. Last month’s reading for the euro-region gauge was 0.7 percent, the lowest on record.
“Investors have yet to react to the deflationary threat,” wrote Edwards, a London-based strategist who says stocks are in a multiyear bear market that he calls the Ice Age. “They simply do not believe a recession that would trigger outright deflation is on the horizon.”
International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde highlighted the risk of falling prices two days ago during a speech in Washington. She urged policy makers in the U.S. and other advanced economies to avert deflation, which would hamper a “feeble” economic recovery.
“If U.S. growth in 2014 proves as disappointing as in previous years, then there should be a large market reaction as inflation expectations get pegged back closer to euro-zone levels,” Edwards wrote.
Economists expect gross domestic product to rise this year by 2.8 percent, exceeding last year’s 1.9 percent, according to the average estimate in a Bloomberg survey. They also expect a bigger increase in the deflator for core consumer spending, to 1.6 percent from 1.3 percent." - source Bloomberg.

To conclude on Ben Bernanke's legacy, we quite enjoyed Doug Noland recent take on the subject in his column entitled "The Departing Bernanke on Macro-Prudential":
Q&A from the National Association of Business Economics conference, Philadelphia, January 3, 2014: William Nordhaus, Yale University economics professor and chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston: “I asked my students if they had a question for [Bernanke]. And there were a number of them, one which I won’t ask is ‘what about bitcoin?’ – which I know he knows about. But I thought a really interesting one was this: ‘If you knew in 2006 what you know now, what step or steps would you have taken then to prevent or ameliorate the financial crisis and subsequent severe downturn?’” 

Bernanke: “Well that’s a really unfair question. I mean, the reality is that everybody – every policymaker has to make – this is the nature of policy – it has to be made in very, very foggy conditions with very imperfect information – a lot of uncertainty. So, in order to do anything, I think I would not only have to know everything in advance, everyone else would have to know I knew everything in advance. In other words, if I went out and started saying – all of the sudden I’m arbitrarily raising capital requirements by five percentage points, the banks would say ‘What!’ and it would be very difficult to get Congress and the other regulators and so on and so on to agree. I mean I think the crisis was very complex, involved many many issues. One of the concerns, I want to respond indirectly to a point…, the usefulness of macro-prudential-type measures. I think one of the practical questions is, even if you think you’ve got macro-prudential measures that work, can you put them in place quickly enough and responsibly enough, preemptively enough.

"To know and not to act is not to know." - Cosmopolis - Don Delillo

So long "Departed".

Stay tuned!

Credit - Growth divergence between the USA and Europe. It's in the credit prices stupid!

"I don't believe we're seeing the beginning of a divergence. We have seen a partial divergence on this case." - Mario Monti 

Following up on our previous conversation relating to the growth divergence between the USA and Europe in May this year (Growth divergence between the USA and Europe? It's the credit conditions stupid...), we want to point out in this credit conversation that the aforementioned divergence has been growing as well in the credit space.

The divergence between US and European PMI indexes - source Bloomberg:

Back in our May conversation we indicated the following reasons behind the growth differential between both economies was due to credit conditions:
"In recent conversations as well we have been highlighting the growth differential between the US and Europe ("Shipping is a leading deflationary indicator"):

"We have long argued that the difference between the FED and the ECB would indeed lead to different growth outcomes between the US and Europe (US economy will grow 2.2% this year versus a 0.4% contraction in the euro area, according to the median economist estimates compiled by Bloomberg):

"Whereas the FED dealt with the stock (mortgages), the ECB via the alkaloid LTRO is dealing with the flows, facilitating bank funding and somewhat slowing the deleveraging process but in no way altering the credit profile of the financial institutions benefiting from it! While it is clearly reducing the risk of banks insolvency in the near term, it is not alleviating the risk of a credit crunch, as indicated in the latest ECB's latest lending survey which we discussed in our last conversation -The LTRO Alkaloid - 12th of February 2012."

The divergence of growth between the US economy and the European economy has been indeed reflected in credit prices such as the US leveraged loan cash price index versus its European peer. You can clearly notice the uncanning similarity with the above graph from Bloomberg indicating the evolution of the PMI index - source Bloomberg:

While both the PMIs and Leveraged loan prices cratered in 2008, you can see the impressive rebound in 2009, leading in the rapid surge in cash prices for leveraged loans and the increasing divergence in cash prices as indicated by the growing spread between US leveraged loan prices and European leveraged loan prices now at 7 points apart.

Similarly, the evolution of Credit indices such as the Itraxx Main Europe representing 125 entities of investment grade companies and the CDX IG index for US Investment Grade are both reflecting a similar divergence as reported by Morgan Stanley in their European Credit Strategy report from the 8th of October:

This divergence can as well be seen in the perception of credit risk for Investment Grade. This is divergence between the CDX IG 5 year CDS index and the European Itraxx Main Europe CDS 5 year index (125 Investment Grade entities), is at 32 bps but fell from the highest point reached of 64 bps in September 2011 thanks to the LTRO operations at the end of 2011 and the recent ECB pledge - source Bloomberg:

Given the latest forecasts for economic growth in both the USA and Europe (2% for the US and -0.4% for Europe according to the IMF), one can expect US investment grade credit to outperform European investment grade credit as implied by Morgan Stanley's 3 month forward model from their recent report:

- source Morgan Stanley Research, Markit, Bloomberg Company Reports.

Europe vs US Loan prices - source Morgan Stanley, S&P LCD, European Credit Strategy, 8th of October 2010:

Morgan Stanley's economic forecast between Europe and the USA,  not only points towards a growing divergence between both but an environment which still present value for credit given the low yield and low growth current environment:

So why the continued growing divergence? It is all about deleveraging and access to funding.

For the last two years, European companies have been using the bond markets for funding to replace bank financing and particularly in Europe. In their latest Euro Consumer Takeaways from the 10th of October, independent credit research company CreditSights indicated the following:

"For at least two years, European corporates have been using the bond markets to replace bank financing as a major source of funding. Given the size and stability of European food and beverage companies, that exit from bank financing was less pressing than for smaller, more leveraged companies. But a similar trend now looks to be coming to pass in food and bev. AB InBev, Heineken and to a lesser extent, Nestlé have all pre-financed acquisitions in the bond markets when putting bank facilities in place would have been the norm. In addition, we would note that the publicly-issued and privately-placed US dollar bonds have been the instruments of choice. Seven of our coverage have issued dollar debt this year. This looks like a diversity play for both the companies and the investor base. The companies want access to another funding source. In some cases, they have borne the costs of swapping into their domestic currency. The investors seek the attraction of non-US exposure in a relatively risk-free industry in order to provide portfolio diversification without the euro currency risk. Interestingly enough, the tranche-ing of the four multi-billion dollar deals from SABMiller at the start of year to Heineken in early October has been relatively similar. This suggests that investor preferences on maturities haven't really changed through the course of this year, implying that the ebbs and flows of the global business environment haven't really changed where investors see value. Anecdotally, there seemed to have been good dollar appetite so perhaps, once SABMiller set the template early this year, it might have been a case of 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it'. Maybe that is the real lesson of investing in European Retail and Food and Beverage this year."

While more recently we have been relatively concerned about the dwindling liquidity ("Yield Famine"), and the role of positive basis in credit  as an additional indicator of our "uneasiness" ("The Uneasiness in Easiness"), low growth, low yield and low volatility regime in the current environment make allocation to  non-financial credit (both High Yield and Investment Grade) essential.

As a reminder on the definition of basis in credit:

The basis represents the difference in spread between credit default swaps (CDS) and bonds for the same debt issuer and with similar, if not exactly equal maturities. In the credit derivatives market, basis can be positive or negative. A negative basis means that the CDS spread is smaller than the bond spread.

Nomura's Fixed Income Research team made some very important points we think in their latest report entitled - Who sets the cost of capital? Policy makers or markets? - on the 11th of October :

“Our argument is that the financial risk of firms has been falling more than business risk as cash balances have been increased, balance sheets have been deleveraged and the maturity of debt structures increased. In addition, this has come at the expense of medium-term growth expectations as retained earnings have not been used to boost capital spending but rather to de-risk corporate balance sheets. And this marking down of medium-term growth expectations produces ever lower expected forward risk-free rates underscoring the improved financial risk of the corporate sector. So we make the case that the business risk component of corporate risk has fallen by less than the financial risk and as such credit represents a better source of alpha than equity. This sort of thinking leads naturally to Robert Merton's work on valuing corporate debt. He views debt and equity as contingent claims on a firm‟s assets, with option pricing being the vehicle of choice for finding the value of those claims. In Merton's world owning a corporate bond is equivalent to holding a risk-free bond plus selling a put option on the firm's assets to equity investors. Seen from this perspective the yield spread is merely the premium for selling the option. It is not a huge jump to see falling implied equity volatility as a green light to look for at worst stable credit spreads and therefore carry trades to be the focus. “ 

"Simply put, lower levels of leverage mean more of the intrinsic un-diversifiable risk within the firm is being passed on to equity holders than debt holders." - Nomura

Indeed, corporate deleveraging might imply a new golden age for credit because, as we indicated in April 2012 in our conversation "Deleveraging - Bad for equities but good for credit assets", credit is far less volatile than equities (see above graph from Nomura). 

Nomura in their recent report put forward this very central point:
“Given that the bulk of returns in equities is linked to earnings whereas the credit spread should be driven by distance to default and recovery rates, flat earnings are not necessarily bad for credit as long as risk premia remain under control. And policy appears to be aimed squarely at keeping a lid on risk premia. Clearly this argument would not hold if earnings fall back significantly, or in other words a recession became the central case. “ 

and also added:
"Total return in credit should be seen as less risky if the Fed is taking yields on the risk-free rate down at longer maturities."  - source Nomura


Why is so?
We agree with Nomura namely that it depends who sets the cost of capital, markets or policymakers:
"So, if the drivers of returns remain precariously balanced, leaning together like drunks on a tram so to speak, then the undoubted outperformers we maintain are fixed income products, in particular HY and IG. What could go wrong with this? Well obviously two things – policy is ineffective and another recession occurs, or policy is effective and the economy booms. 

Central banks are now well outside their “normal” remit of setting short-term interest rates and are instead attempting directly to set the cost of capital for a series of normally market-determined assets. In the US the Fed has embarked on twist, and now MBS purchases, and in the euro area the ECB has embarked on contingent shifts in front-end government bond yields toward a policy-mandated level. While the motivation for each may be rather different (market failure considerations versus stimulus), the impact on other asset classes is of a great deal of interest via portfolio rebalancing as competing required returns must react. 

If we think about this in terms of the securities market line (SML) from the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) then the debate may be easier to get a handle on. 

Normally we treat central bank policy action as shifting the intercept of the securities market line up or down with the setting of interest rate policy - the risk-free rate. The slope of the securities market line (SML) is seen as being set by fundamentals (how risky the market portfolio is seen to be and the general aggregate level of risk aversion). This does not mean that individual assets can't migrate up and down the SML as their perceived betas shift around - the most obvious recent one being the entire emerging markets fixed income world. 

By setting the risk-free rate at (essentially) zero central banks engaging in QE, twist or OMT are instead shifting the required return on individual assets out along the SML. Now, the key question is whether by doing this they can lower the slope of the entire SML line via reduced expected risk and/or higher risk appetite. 

The determining factor as to whether the whole line flattens or only the targeted asset beta shifts, we would argue, is the effectiveness of monetary policy (perhaps the slope of the IS curve might give us a clue). If policy is seen as being ineffective, then it is likely that a beta shift will occur only for the targeted asset and only if the new policy does not make the fundamentals worse. If policy is effective then the entire market portfolio does better even if the forward risk-free rate is expected to rise. 

In the present era we have made the case before but feel it is worth restating, that market confidence/sentiment has taken the place of the traditional credit channel of monetary policy. Central bankers want to generate improving expectations as a result of policy, which in turn begets better growth expectations and a flatter SML line and so on and so forth. 

Anything that detracts from that bullish sentiment undermines the credibility of the policy. Detractions can be mistakes elsewhere - i.e. Europe or EM growth - or perverse effects of the policy itself. In terms of the former, note how EM equity betas rose as the Fed engaged in Twist. This is partly because EM growth concerns began to rise then. 

And in terms of policy having perverse effects, we have argued that the attempt to set a lower cost of capital for all assets merely causes a distortion (unless there is genuine market failure) in the cost of capital across different quality firms and assets, which is unwarranted given their intrinsic risks. 

This may go some way to explaining the curious lack of M&A, buy backs and private equity deals over recent times. Could it be that strong firms are loath to pay what are perceived to be high prices for weaker firms? Could it be that by shifting the entire SML down policy has lifted all boats including the weakest and thus has delayed or actually removed the need for poor, value-destroying businesses and managements to change business strategy or be ¡°taken out¡± of the market? 

If this is the case then it is an extremely important consideration since it implies that we should continue to expect only modest growth in aggregate demand since cash balances will continue to be held rather than "worked" and firms that by definition are using capital unproductively will continue to exist. 

The unpleasant side effect of intervening to set the cost of capital is that it probably means more modest medium-term growth expectations than otherwise might be the case, which leads to lower expected returns being attached to equities and initially at least a higher required return for holding them (i.e. a fall in price now). And this can happen without high volatility owing to liquidity swamping risk premia." - source Nomura

Arguably in our recent conversation "The World of Yesterday", we posited that a Mouse trap, or Bull Trap, had indeed definitely been loaded in the credit space, looking at the worrying trend of the return of Cov-lite loans financing (Back in May 2012, we specifically discussed this return in our conversation "The return of Cov-Lite loans and all that Jazz..."). Not only are we seeing the return of dubious financing that peaked before the financial crisis such as Cov-lite financing, but we are also seeing the return of payment-in-kind notes as reported by Sarika Gangar and David Holley in Bloomberg in their article  - Bubble-Era Financing Returns as Profits Falter on the 11th of October:
"A type of financing that peaked before credit markets seized up four years ago is staging a comeback just as concern mounts that corporate profits are falling and the global economy is losing steam. Offerings of $2.1 billion in the past 30 days of so-called payment-in-kind notes, which allow borrowers to pay interest with extra debt, account for more than a third of this year’s $6 billion of deals, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Pharmaceutical Product Development Inc., a Wilmington, North Carolina-based contract research firm, sold $525 million of the notes yesterday. Sales of high-yield, high-risk bonds are soaring to a record pace as interest rates hover at unprecedented lows send investors toward riskier assets. JPMorgan Chase and Co. says credit metrics are deteriorating, with leverage at investment- grade borrowers potentially approaching financial crisis levels by year-end, as the International Monetary Fund lowers its global growth forecast to the slowest pace since 2009. “You only hear about PIK bonds when the high-yield markets are really frothy,” William Larkin, a fixed-income money manager who helps oversee $500 million at Cabot Money Management Inc. in Salem, Massachusetts, said in a telephone interview. The trend “is OK if we’re at that part of the cycle where things start to accelerate. But we don’t know that.” " - source Bloomberg.


So yes, the above confirms  that the Credit Mouse trap has indeed been set and loaded as confirmed by the conclusions of the  quoted Bloomberg article:
"While PIK bonds may perform for a while, “when they stop performing well they become virtually unsellable at times, and they can drop in price rather substantially,” James Kochan, chief fixed-income strategist at Wells Fargo Funds Management LLC in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, said in a telephone interview." - source Bloomberg

On a final note as far as Consumer-Loan growth is concerned, according to Bloomberg Chart of the Day, it helps schools, not stores:

"The CHART OF THE DAY compares the amount of consumer credit outstanding with the total excluding student loans, as compiled by the Federal Reserve. Borrowing for school expenses accounted for all of this year’s 2.9 percent growth in credit. Any gains for retail chains will be limited to “some incremental spending” made possible by the education loans, John Heinbockel, an analyst from Guggenheim Securities LLC based in New York, wrote two days ago in a report. The current rate of borrowing may be unsustainable, the report said. This year’s average monthly balance of consumer loans rose 4.6 percent through August from a year earlier. The increase exceeded growth in household income by 1.4 percentage points, about twice the average gap since 1969." - source Bloomberg.

“As long as the music is playing, you've got to get up and dance." - Citigroup's ex-chief executive, Charles O. Prince -  July 2007.

 Stay tuned!