PrefBlog

It’s nice to see a statistic about how many CLOs lost money in the Credit Crunch:

Issuance of CLOs, which helped finance some of the biggest leveraged buyouts in history during the last credit boom, has picked up following an early 2014 slump brought on by the publication of the Volcker Rule designed to limit risk-taking by banks — major buyers of the funds. CLOs are investors in speculative-grade loans, an asset class in which U.S. banking regulators have said underwriting standards have become too lax.
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CLOs pool high-yield corporate loans and slice them into securities of varying risk and return, typically from AAA ratings down to BB. The lowest portion, known as the equity tranche, offers the highest potential returns and the greatest risk because investors are the first to see their interest payouts reduced when loans backing the CLO default.

CLO managers may also be trying to issue deals ahead of risk-retention rules proposed by the Dodd-Frank Act in order to increase assets under management and income, said Kroszner. The regulation may require CLO managers to hold 5 percent of the debt they package or sell.
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Out of 719 U.S. CLOs that purchased widely syndicated loans and were rated by Moody’s Investors Service between January 1996 and May 2012, only 14 funds lost any of their principal at maturity, according to a July 2012 report from the ratings firm.
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The growth in riskier corporate lending led the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to warn lenders last year to improve lax underwriting practices. Todd Vermilyea, a Fed official, said May 13 that standards “have continued to deteriorate in 2014” and that “stronger supervisory action” may be needed.

While the Volcker Rule hasn’t led to fewer CLOs it has kept the cost to raise the funds elevated.

The average rate paid on CLO portions ranked AAA was about 150 basis points more than the London interbank offered rate in May, according to Wells Fargo. That’s up from a spread as low as 110 basis points on AAA slices last year.

As I have often complained, regulators and politicians are always careful to talk about downgrades of engineered products, rather than actual defaults.

Watch out for falling house prices!

In May, new home prices in 62 Chinese cities edged downward from the month before, dragging down the Chinese average for the first time in nearly two years. The biggest decline came in Shantou, where prices fell 3.64 per cent from April, according to China Index Academy, a research arm of SouFun, which operates the country’s largest real estate portal.

China’s real estate market is the bedrock of its economy. Residential housing is worth some 12.5 per cent of GDP, and homes contain some two-thirds of Chinese household wealth. A fracture in Chinese housing, in other words, is a fracture in China’s financial well-being.

And the slowdown has come with remarkable speed. Last December, Chinese housing prices rose 12 per cent year-on-year, the biggest gain of 2013. By May, sales were down more than 50 per cent from April at Shantou’s Jiacheng Real Estate Agency.

Assiduous Readers will know of my fondness for mocking CalPERS – the politicized fund that doesn’t do credit analysis. I’ve acquired another target – The Norwegian Government Pension Fund, an $853.9 billion pension fund with no trading expertise:

Norway’s $880 billion sovereign wealth fund, the world’s largest, is throwing its support behind Brad Katsuyama’s new exchange.

Katsuyama’s IEX Group Inc., made famous in Michael Lewis’s best-selling book “Flash Boys,” could shield investors from the predatory habits of high-frequency traders, said the fund, which holds $521.2 billion in stocks globally and is Europe’s biggest equity investor.

“IEX is a trading venue where all players participate on the same terms,” oil fund spokesman Thomas Sevang said in an e-mailed response to questions. “We support this.”

The BoC kept overnight rates steady:

Total CPI inflation has moved up to around the 2 per cent target, sooner than anticipated in the Bank’s April Monetary Policy Report (MPR), largely due to the temporary effects of higher energy prices and exchange rate pass-through. Core inflation remains significantly below 2 per cent although it has drifted up slightly, partly owing to past exchange rate movements.
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The Canadian economy grew at a modest rate in the first quarter, held back by severe weather and supply constraints. The ingredients for a pickup in exports remain in place, including the lower Canadian dollar and an anticipated strengthening of foreign demand. Improved corporate profits, especially in exchange rate-sensitive sectors, should also support higher business investment in the coming quarters. There are continued signs of a soft landing in the housing market and a constructive evolution of household imbalances. We still expect excess supply to be absorbed gradually as the fundamental drivers of growth and inflation in Canada strengthen.

Weighing recent higher inflation readings against slightly increased risks to economic growth leaves the downside risks to the inflation outlook as important as before. At the same time, the risks associated with household imbalances remain elevated. The Bank judges that the balance of risks remains within the zone for which the current stance of monetary policy is appropriate and therefore has decided to maintain the target for the overnight rate at 1 per cent. The timing and direction of the next change to the policy rate will depend on how new information influences the balance of risks.

There was some chatter about the effect on the dollar:

The loonie had been as high as about 91.7 cents, but began to slip in anticipation of the announcement, to 91.5 cents. In the wake of the statement, it dipped further to 91.3 cents, and by midday stood at 91.4 cents.

Before today, the currency had been hovering around the 92-cent level, having moved up recently.
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“It could have been expected that downside interest rates moves were taken off the table but this is not the case,” said Rahim Madhavji of Knightsbridge Foreign Exchange.

“The Canadian dollar fell lower on the Bank of Canada continuing to harp a tone of we’re still nowhere close to raising interest rates,” he added in a research note titled “Bank of Canada slaps loonie lower.”

“It seems that the Bank of Canada is quite content with the lower Canadian dollar boosting exports and assisting with inflation. Today’s BoC statement removes any catalyst for loonie bulls in the near term.”

… and some criticism of the dovish language:

“Comes a point the central bank will have to drop the dovish language, although it’s clear that it will try to delay as long as possible,” said Krishen Rangasamy, senior economist the National Bank of Canada.

The bank’s insistence that disinflation remains a threat could prove tough to defend as as the summer and fall wear on, Bank of Nova Scotia economists Derek Holt and Dov Zigler said in a research note. “The Bank of Canada faces a greater sales job to explain why the ‘downside risks to the inflation outlook [are] as important as before,’” they said.

… though mind you, the dollar isn’t helping exports much:

For months, Mr. Poloz and other bank officials have stressed the importance of exports and business investment to putting the economy back on track.

But so far, exports continue to underperform – a reality underscored by Statistics Canada’s report Wednesday that exports dropped 1.8 per cent in April, tilting the trade balance back into deficit.

I think it’s unclear as to where all this hyperinflation and wheelbarrowfulls of cash are going to come from. Not Europe!

Euro zone price inflation fell unexpectedly in May, increasing the risks of deflation in the currency area and sealing the case for the European Central Bank to act this week.

Annual consumer inflation in the 18 countries sharing the euro fell to 0.5 per cent in May from 0.7 per cent in April, the EU’s statistics office Eurostat said on Tuesday.

… not with negative interest rates in Europe, it won’t:

Mario Draghi’s experiment with negative interest rates is unlikely to stop investors from seeking something stronger.

The European Central Bank president will herald a new era today by taking the deposit rate below zero, according to economists in a Bloomberg News survey. That probably won’t quell calls for more radical measures such as quantitative easing to stop the euro area from sliding into deflation.
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In the Bloomberg survey, 44 of 50 economists said the ECB will cut its deposit rate to negative from zero, with the median estimate for a level of minus 0.1 percent. The survey also predicts that the benchmark main refinancing rate will be reduced by 15 basis points to a record-low 0.1 percent.

The decision will be announced at 1:45 p.m. in Frankfurt. Draghi will hold a press conference 45 minutes later, where he’ll also release revised ECB forecasts on inflation and economic growth.

… which may help a mouthpiece for the UK government carry out his instructions:

Mark Carney has a new ally in his battle to keep Bank of England policy loose: Mario Draghi.

As the BOE’s nine-person Monetary Policy Committee divides between Carney’s view that low rates are still needed and a faction leaning toward higher borrowing costs, events in Frankfurt may favor the governor by weakening the euro against the pound, helping to curb U.K. inflation pressure. The MPC meets in London today and will announce its decision at noon.

It was a mixed day of adjustment for the Canadian preferred share market today, following yesterday’s fireworks, with PerpetualDiscounts down 26bp, FixedResets up 23bp and DeemedRetractibles gaining 4bp. The Performance Highlights table is longer than usual and dominated by winning FixedResets. Volume was on the high side of average.

PerpetualDiscounts now yield 5.30%, equivalent to 6.89% interest at the standard equivalency factor of 1.3x. Long corporates now yield about 4.35%, so the pre-tax interest-equivalent spread (in this context the “Seniority Spread”) is now about 255bp, a slight (and perhaps spurious) widening from the 250bp reported May 28.

Scott Barlow had a polemic in the Globe titled Debt markets’ ‘lunacy’ threatens equity investors:

U.S. credit markets are absurdly overbought and equity investors on both sides of the border will be very much in the way of the inevitable correction when it occurs.

The most common method of gauging whether corporate debt is attractive or expensive is the spread – the difference in yield between a corporate bond issue and a government bond issue of the same maturity. When the spread is low, it is more difficult for investors to generate returns and there is less margin of safety.

The accompanying chart shows that the spread on the riskiest form of corporate debt – high yield bonds – are trading at spreads very close to the pre-2007 lows. At the same time, the CBOE Volatility Index – which uses equity option prices to measure expected volatility and market risk – is hitting all time lows. In other words, debt markets are expensive, and investors are broadly complacent.
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New River Investments LLC hedge fund manager Guillermo Roditi Dominguez’s exasperation with current prices was evident on Twitter last week (where insiders can be particularly blunt on this issue) after a Walt Disney Co. three-year bond was issued: “just saw the disney bond. 20 over [treasuries]. twenty. time to pack it up and go hit the pool. i aint abuyin no more bonds this year [sic].”

Well, fine. But the reference to Disney led me to do a little more digging on the deal:

The strong demand for double A rated company’s offering has allowed the deal to price inside its outstanding bonds, which is a market coup for the technology giant.
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Apple’s outstanding 2.4% May 2023s are quoted at a G-spread of 75bp, suggesting the new issue concession on the 10-year is around 2bp. The 30-year bonds are offering just 4bp of concession, based on where the outstanding 3.85% May 2043 is trading at Treasuries plus 104bp, while the five-year bonds offer a roughly negative 1.5bp concession compared with the outstanding 1% May 2018s trading at a G-spread of 39bp.

Outstanding three-year bonds were quoted at a G-spread of 19bp, so the concession on the new bonds was about negative 1bp.

A negative concession is fascinating and in conjunction with yesterday‘s discussion of increased underwriting competition – as well as previous discussions of US corporate bond liquidity – lead me to suspect that liquidity is in very short supply in the States. Where else but in the new issue market can a PM buy $10-million in corporates at a reasonable – albeit historically narrow – spread?

Other Disney commentary led into a discussion of Enbridge (briefly mentioned on May 29):

Other deals Wednesday saw spreads tighten even further from IPTs to pricing, which one banker said was down to Disney beginning with little in the way of new issue concession – leaving investors unwilling to lose out on any further pick-up.

At pricing the four-part trade appeared to carry concessions between flat to 8bp compared with the company’s outstandings.
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“But broadly, after the recent flurry of issuance, most other issuers may need to be a bit more conservative at the start to create momentum in the book.” [said an unnamed banker].

Canadian energy company Enbridge did just that – and was able to tighten levels on its 10- and 30-year fixed rate bonds and three-year floaters substantially.

The 10s and 30s were announced with IPTs of Treasuries plus 125bp–130bp and plus 145bp–150bp, while the floater came at Libor plus low 60s.

These levels were pushed tighter to final pricing levels of plus 110bp and plus 125bp on the fixed and plus 45bp on the floater.

At the IPT stage, compared with outstanding 4% October 2023s at a G-spread of 114bp, the 10-year seemed to carry about 11bp to 16bp in concession, while the 30-year had about 15bp to 20bp in concession versus 4.55% August 2043s at G+130bp.

These juicy concessions enticed investors to jump in with orders that subsequently allowed it to tighten levels – and end up paying concessions of negative 4bp and negative 5bp.

Low yields are not confined to the US:

Europe’s lowest government bond yields since the Napoleonic Wars are signaling investors want more action from Mario Draghi.

Instead of a vote of confidence, the most pronounced rally in 200 years suggests the European Central Bank president needs to stave off the risks of stagnation and deflation. Austria, Belgium, France (GFRN10) and Germany can borrow at lower rates than the U.S. as inflation less than half the ECB’s target stokes concern the euro zone will take many years to recover from its longest-ever recession.
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Speculation the ECB will provide more stimulus pushed yields on euro-region sovereign debt to a record-low 1.43 percent on May 30, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Euro Government Bond Index. Draghi said May 8 the Governing Council is “comfortable” taking action to boost consumer-price growth, which at 0.7 percent in April was well below the ECB’s aim of keeping it just under 2 percent.
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Rates on German 10-year bonds were at 1.37 percent yesterday, less than a quarter of a percentage point away from 1.127 percent reached in June 2012, the lowest since at least 1815, according to “The History of Interest Rates” by Sidney Homer and Richard Sylla. That was the year of Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo, after which the Congress of Vienna redrew the map of Europe, leading to the creation of the German Confederation.

Germany’s current yield compares with an average of 3.03 percent in the past 10 years. The interest rate for government loans was 3.6 percent in 1944 during World War II and 12.5 percent in 1931 amid the Great Depression, according to the book.

I’m not sure I’d want to be a fixed income manager in Germany in 1944, even if I was seeing 3.6% yields!

I understand that marketing for the NEW.PR.C refunding has commenced, but a prospectus is not yet available.

It was a negative day for the Canadian preferred share market, with FixedReset prices collapsing in the final hour of trading; PerpetualDiscounts were off 1bp, FixedResets got whacked for 44bp and DeemedRetractibles were flat. A lengthy Performance Highlights table is comprised almost entirely of losing FixedResets, with the solitary exception being a FixedFloater loser. Volume was very heavy.

No sooner had I delivered my crushing retort to my cashless friends than I became aware of a piece in the Globe by Ian McGugan titled Why central bankers would like to trash your cash:

An end to folding money could offer many advantages, according to Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard professor and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. The most immediate payoffs would come from cracking down on drug traffickers and tax evaders.

This could have surprisingly large benefits for government coffers. In a column in the Financial Times this week, Prof. Rogoff estimates that untaxed, underground transactions account for 7 to 8 per cent of the U.S. economy and probably even more of its European counterpart. Bringing all those cash-only transactions into the light by forcing them to be conducted through the banking system, where the taxman could track them, would provide governments with a nice revenue boost.
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One option, in theory, would be to impose negative interest rates – to apply a penalty charge on bank balances to spur people to spend. One big problem with this in practice, however, is that it just won’t work because “people will start bailing out into cash,” as Prof. Rogoff writes.

But what if there was no cash? Government could then adjust rates however it wanted, even well into negative territory, to force people to stop sitting on their wealth.

A miracle has occurred! Competition is having an effect on underwriting fees … maybe!

With trading profits dwindling, more dealers than ever are fighting for assignments managing U.S. corporate-bond sales, one of the few bright spots in fixed income. Companies from the most-creditworthy to the most-indebted have been selling trillions of dollars of debt, locking in record-low borrowing costs ahead of the anticipated rise in interest rates.
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A record 144 underwriters for the period have split an estimated $4.2 billion of fees on U.S. sales, the data show.
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The five most-active corporate-debt underwriters this year landed 47 percent of the business, the smallest share on record. That’s down from 59 percent of the assignments for all of 2009.
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Smaller firms see an opportunity to break into the business as Wall Street’s behemoths unload inventories of riskier securities in the face of higher capital requirements and limits imposed by the U.S. Dodd-Frank Act’s Volcker Rule on the amount of their own money they can use to trade.

Royal Bank of Canada has climbed to 11th most-active underwriter of corporate bonds in the U.S., from 14th place in the period four years earlier, Bloomberg data show.
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Debt underwriting fees among the nine-biggest banks were 5.8 percent lower in the first three months of 2014 from the same period last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg Industries. The slump in fees outpaced a 2.6 percent drop in the volume of global corporate bond sales.

The article isn’t all that clear on actual fees. The fee drop among the nine-biggest firms outpaces the drop in total issuance, but the market share of the five-biggest has dropped considerably. It is conceivable that prices haven’t dropped at all and that the quoted differences are due the changes in volume, market share and product mix. But we can hope!

Tobias Adrian, Richard Crump, Benjamin Mills and Emanuel Moench have been working on the Treasury term premium:

Treasury yields can be decomposed into two components: expectations of the future path of short-term Treasury yields and the Treasury term premium. The term premium is the compensation that investors require for bearing the risk that short-term Treasury yields do not evolve as they expected. Studying the term premium over a long time period allows us to investigate what has historically driven changes in Treasury yields. In this blog post, we estimate and analyze the Treasury term premium from 1961 to the present, and make these estimates available for download here.
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In a previous post, we compared our estimated term premium to a number of observable variables. We showed that the term premium is a countercyclical variable which tends to move with measures of uncertainty and disagreement about the future level of yields.
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The evolution of term premia has been of particular interest since the Federal Reserve began large-scale asset purchases. Over this time, short-term interest rates have been close to zero, and our estimates show that the term premium has been compressed and has at times even been negative. An advantage of our estimate is that it is available back to 1961. Hence, we can study the term premium at another time when short-term interest rates were close to zero. By comparing the ten-year ACM term premium of the past decade to that of the 1960s in the first chart, we find that the ten-year term premium was negative at times in the 1960s, but reverted back to positive. Similarly, our estimate of the term premium has risen above zero recently.

Daily estimates of the ACM term premium from 1961 to the present are now available for download from the Data & Indicators section of the New York Fed’s website. The data are updated weekly and include estimates of the term premium for yearly Treasury maturities from one to ten years, as well as fitted yields and the expected average level of short-term interest rates.

I get lots of ‘friend’ requests on LinkedIn and Facebook from people whose names I don’t recognize. If I don’t recognize the name, I don’t respond; to me, that sounds basic. Some people disagree:

In an unprecedented, three-year cyber espionage campaign, Iranian hackers created false social networking accounts and a fake news website to spy on military and political leaders in the United States, Israel and other countries, a cyber intelligence firm said on Thursday.

ISight Partners, which uncovered the operation, said the hackers’ targets include a four-star U.S. Navy admiral, U.S. lawmakers and ambassadors, members of the U.S.-Israeli lobby, and personnel from Britain, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.
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The hackers set up false accounts on Facebook and other online social networks for these 14 personas, populated their profiles with fictitious personal content, and then tried to befriend target victims, according to iSight.
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To build credibility, the hackers would approach high-value targets by first establishing ties with the victims’ friends, classmates, colleagues, relatives and other connections over social networks run by Facebook Inc., Google Inc. and its YouTube, LinkedIn Corp. and Twitter Inc.

The hackers would initially send the targets content that was not malicious, such as links to news articles on NewsOnAir.org, in a bid to establish trust. Then they would send links that infected PCs with malicious software, or direct targets to web portals that ask for network log-in credentials, iSight said.

It was a mixed day for the Canadian preferred share market, with PerpetualDiscounts off 20bp, FixedResets up 10bp and DeemedRetractibles gaining 1bp. The Performance Highlights table is of above-average length, with a preponderance of FixedReset issues on the winning side, bouncing back a bit from Friday‘s carnage. Volume was below average.