Chart Of The Day "Junk Yields"

Despite the rollercoaster ride in stocks the action in the bond & debtmarket is even more fascinating....... The main driver of equities for the next few years will be the quality of the balance sheet ( especially after goodwill....) and the timetable for the refinancing of the maturing debt/bonds..... Earnings will be a second-tier issue..... Bondholders will be in the driver seat........ No more attempts to "return value to shareholders" like shown from Daimler ( see How Daimler Wasted € 7 Billion On Buybacks In Just 15 Months...... )..... Needless to say they are also now begging for some kind of bailout.......

Trotz des tagtäglichen Wahnsinns an den Aktienmärkten spielt sich noch sagenhafteres an den Kredit & Anleihemärkten ab. Denke das in den nächten Jahren wie bereits mehrfach erwähnt vorrangig die Bilanzqualität ( vor allem nach den kommenden Goodwillabschreibungen, da versteckt sich noch so manche Bombe....siehe Die nächste Bilanzbombe tickt FTD, besonders interessant wenn mal wieder auf die niedrige Buchwertbewertung der DAXtitel hingewiesen wird .... Got Gold......) sowie die Zeitachse der kommenden Refinanzierungen der ausstehen Anleihen/Kredite die erste Geige für die Aktienkursentwicklung spielen wird. Die Gewinne ( oder besser ausgedrückt Verluste ) rücken da eindeutig in den Hintergrund. Die Bondholder werden zukünftig das sagen haben..... Immerhin bleibt uns dann der Wahnsinn der schuldenfinanzierten Aktienrückkäufe erspart ( das passiert wenn der Vorstand sich mit Haut und Haaren dem kurzfristigen "shareholder value" & seinen Aktienoptionen verschrieben hat.....Betonung liegt hier auf kurzfristig ... Fragt mal bei Daimler nach... siehe How Daimler Wasted € 7 Billion On Buybacks In Just 15 Months...... )


WSJ

Unrelenting declines in corporate "junk" bonds have pushed yields on these riskier securities to over 20% on average, a record

Bespoke

Based on data from Merrill Lynch, high yield bonds are yielding nearly 1,800 basis points more than comparable Treasuries. In the last month alone, spreads have risen by more than 200 basis points, and since bottoming in the Summer of 2007 at 241 basis points, they are up 645%. To put this in perspective, with the 10-Year US Treasury now yielding 3.4%, a high-yield borrower would need to pay roughly 21.4% per year to take out a ten-year loan. With terms like these, who needs loan sharks?

Much more insight via Naked Cpitalism Junk Bond Yields Up Sharply. On top of this visit FT Alphaville for an even more "impressive" chart on CDS ( see iTraxx Europe at all time high ). Combine all this with this chart and is not difficult to imagine that the worst is still to come.....

Mehr Details mal wieder von Naked Capitalism Junk Bond Yields Up Sharply . Einen noch beeindruckenderen Chart der CDS bietet FT Alphaville ( siehe iTraxx Europe at all time high ). Wenn man nun das Drama mit diesem Chart kombiniert ist unschwer zu erkennen das uns "ruppige" Zeiten ins Haus stehen......

Another LBO Deal Bites The Dust....

Looks like Ceberus and others that just a few month ago saw the golden era of private equity are trying to back out of as many deals they have made during the latest quarter of this period. Thank god that Ceberus had forced Daimler only to a few more concessions..... Mish once called the mania "Buyout Bingo". It has worked fine on the upside.....

Sieht ganz so aus als wenn Cebrus & Co die noch vor wenigen Monaten einie goldene Ära für Ihre Branche gesehen haben wollen momentan alles mögliche Versuchen um aus Ihren Kaufverträgen auszusteigen. Zum Glück hat Ceberus Daimer beim Chryslerkauf nur zu Nachbesserungen gezwungen.... Mish hat das ganze mal sehr treffend als "Buyout Bingo" beschrieben. Auf dem Weg nach oben eine tolle Geschichte.....

Cerberus abandons $7bn deal as Alltel founders
Cerberus Capital Management has pulled out of its $7bn deal to buy United Rentals, making the planned private equity takeover of the world’s largest equipment lender the latest casualty of the credit squeeze.

The news sent the company’s shares plunging 30% to $23.76. Cerberus had agreed in July to pay $34.50 per share. United Rentals said Cerberus’ action was “unwarranted and incompatible with the covenants of the merger agreement”.

Amid fresh concerns over the ability of private equity groups to fund LBO deals, bankers for TPG and Goldman Sachs were on Wednesday struggling to find investors for loans funding the $27bn buy-out of Alltel, the US wireless carrier. The underwriters reduced the size of the loan package to $4.89bn from $6bn and increased the discount on the issue to 96 cents on the dollar from 97.5 cents.

More trouble for Ceberus.... This deal was done during the past 2 yaers close to the paek of the housing market.....

Hier kommt weiteres Ungemach auf Ceberus zu..... Dieser Deal wurde binnen der letzten 2 Jahre auf dem Peak des Immobubbles abgewickelt.....

GMAC Unit Poses Challenge to Cerberus

The troubles concern GMAC's Residential Capital LLC, once a big source of profit but now burdened with a portfolio of loans rapidly declining in value. That has put the unit, known as ResCap, in danger of violating terms of loan agreements, triggering concerns that its lenders will demand immediate payment or force the unit into bankruptcy protection if GMAC or its owners don't step in with an equity

"poster child for what was not right in the underwriting"

Schadenfreude. The fact that the core tenant is Citigroup doesn´t make things better.....

Schadenfreude pur! Die Tatsache das der Hauptmieter Citigroup ist macht die Sache sicher nicht angenehmer...


NYT Financial Ground Has Shifted Under a Record Deal
The record price paid in January for the 41-story aluminum-clad office tower at 666 Fifth Avenue — $1.8 billion — was breathtaking, even by the standards of the heady Midtown Manhattan commercial real estate market.

Making its first major foray into the Manhattan office market, the buyer, the Kushner Companies of Florham Park, N.J., paid more than three times what the building fetched in 2000.

Today, however, some real estate specialists regard the 666 Fifth Avenue transaction as a textbook example of the risky practices that were prevalent before the current credit squeeze, when many loans were based not on the actual cash flow of the building from existing rents but rather on optimistic projections of what the space might command once those leases expired.

The deal for 666 Fifth “was the poster child for what was not right in the underwriting,”....

Although 666 Fifth Avenue commanded the highest price ever paid for a single building, it does not have quite the cachet of the top Midtown office towers like the Seagram Building. Still, it has a roster of brand-name tenants — one-quarter of the space is leased to Citigroup — and is in a desirable neighborhood, where rents were climbing steadily at the time of the sale.

What raised eyebrows was the financing of 666 Fifth and other buildings sold late last year and early this year, said Robert M. White Jr., the president of Real Capital Analytics, a New York research firm.

A group of lenders led by the real estate unit of Barclays Capital agreed to provide an interest-only first mortgage of $1.215 billion based on an annual cash flow of $114 million, or 1.5 times the debt service, according to a document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

But a footnote pointed out that the cash flow from existing rents would actually cover only 0.65 percent of the debt service. Mr. White calculated that the building’s shortfall amounts to $5 million a month. A $100 million reserve fund was included in the debt package to cover the shortfall.



Underwriting standards have tightened considerably since the summer, and now investors like the Kushners who bought property early in the year are finding they have to invest more of their own money — and assume more of the risk — than they had expected.

Like many buyers, Kushner relied on high-cost short-term financing to make up most of the gap between the first mortgage and the purchase price for 666 Fifth.

By the time the bridge loans had to be paid off, the theory went, the building would be refinanced or the 80,000-square-feet of glassy retail space, most of which faces Fifth Avenue, would be sold as a condominium.

It has not worked out that way. In the spring, the company hired the Carlton Group, a New York investment bank, to help it restructure the deal. But in recent weeks, the company used its own cash to pay back one $200 million bridge loan, said Jared Kushner, the publisher of The New York Observer and a principal in Kushner’s New York office. Another repayment deadline is coming up soon.

Mr. Kushner said the company had a variety of options, including “writing a big check ourselves.” The cash-rich Kushners recently sold 17,500 apartments in five Eastern states for about $2 billion, according to a spokesman.

The Kushners are thought to be much better off than Harry Macklowe, the New York real estate investor who also faces a deadline for repaying a bridge loan. Many real estate professionals say Mr. Macklowe ( read So Many Deals, So Much Debt ) could lose control of the seven Midtown Manhattan office buildings he bought this year as part of the Blackstone Group’s purchase of Equity Office Properties as well as his prized General Motors Building on Fifth Avenue between 58th and 59th Streets. .....

Their broker, Howard L. Michaels, chief executive of the Carlton Group, said the building had generated a lot of interest from investors because of the prospects for rent growth over the next few years. Leases for more than 800,000 square feet of space (out of a total of 1.45 million — with rents far below today’s market rates — are scheduled to expire before 2011.

Annual asking rents for spaces that are currently available range from $92 to $118 a square foot, according to the CoStar Group, a research company in Bethesda, Md.

Home Depot Hit As Credit Crunch Squeezes Deals

60 Days were enough to reduce the price by roughly 20 percent, force Home Depot to take an equity stake, guarantee some of the debt and eliminates lots of convenants that were given to the private equity buyer..... Look like the famous "private equity put" is still there but at a 30% lower pricelevel...... This deal looks similar to the Daimler/Ceberus/chrylser deal where Daimer was forced to step in to unload Chrylser.

60 Tage haben genügt um den Preis um 20% zu drücken, Home Deopt zu nötigen das sie entgegen dem ursprünglichen Plan eine Beteiligung behalten & noch zusätzlich für Schulden geradestehen müssen, die Kreditbestimmungen der Private Equity Käufer fast alle "lockeren Kreditbestimmungen" gestrichen worden sind usw......Sieht ganz so aus als wenn der sog. "Private Equity Put" der angeblich die Märkte nach unten absichert jetzt den Markt 30% tiefer absichert....... Dieser Deal ist fast ne 1:1 Kopie vom modifizierten Daimler/Ceberus/Chrylser Abschluß der Daimler ebenfalls zu ähnlichen Zugeständnissen genötigt hat um endlich Chrysler loszuwerden.

The global credit crunch has begun to put a squeeze on the buyout boom, with banks and private-equity firms forcing Home Depot Inc. to sell its struggling wholesale supply unit for much less than what had been agreed to just two months ago.

Home Depot's board yesterday agreed to sell Home Depot Supply for $8.5 billion to Bain Capital, Carlyle Group and Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, about 18% less than the price hammered out in June when the buyout boom was at its peak.

In addition, Home Depot itself will hold about 12.5% of the unit's equity, people familiar with the matter said, and guarantee some of the debt issued by the banks to finance the acquisition. That's significant because if the banks can't sell the debt in bond markets, and it sits on their balance sheet, they have to mark down its value, which some can ill-afford to do.

Just weeks ago, the buyout boom was a hugely profitable collaboration between private-equity firms and the Wall Street bankers who financed them. Now, amid the credit crunch, some private-equity firms and their bankers are at loggerheads as each camp tries to protect its bottom line, turning previously close allies against each other.

There are an estimated $400 billion in buyout deals working their way through the banking system. Wall Street committed to lend money for these deals as part of its plan to be in the "moving business," of packaging loans and equity stakes in the companies and selling them to investors, spreading out the risk of those transactions. With credit markets largely shut to big transactions, the banks have found themselves back in the old-fashioned "storage business," forced to keep the debt on their balance sheets and mark down its value.
Absorbing Write-Downs
In the process, the nation's banks might have to absorb tens of billions of dollars of write-downs. Such a toll would add to the pain of the far larger losses they are already toting up from the downturn in real estate and the meltdown in the market for mortgage securities.

That set the stage for the nasty squabble over HD Supply. The banks' argument: If the buyout firms could get a reduction in the price they were paying for the business -- Home Depot previously agreed to cut the price tag for the unit by about $1.3 billion to around $9 billion -- the banks should be able to change the terms of their financing for it and other deals. The buyout firms objected, saying a deal was a deal.

"This is what we pay them for," said one top buyout executive. "This is what underwriting is."

Caught in the middle are the companies that have agreed to be sold to buyout firms. Atlanta-based Home Depot, for instance, is suffering in part because of the downturn in the housing market and had planned to use the proceeds of the HD Supply sale to partially fund a $22.5 billion stock buyback plan. The $8.5 billion price tag will allow the retailer to go ahead with its buyback, a person familiar with the matter said, but it means that Home Depot will have sold the unit for little more than what it had spent to acquire the more than 40 wholesale contracting supply companies that make up the supply unit.

> More on the Home Depot buybacks / Mehr zu den Aktienrückkäufen von Home Depot

How Long Can Home Depot And Others Masked Poor Results With Buybacks?

Reviewing The Home Depot Buyback History.......

Among the features of the original HD Supply deal were many of the innovations private-equity firms have introduced in recent years in their pursuit of maximum flexibility. Those innovations denied the lenders many of the protections traditionally written into loan agreements. For example, there were almost no performance requirements set for HD Supply. If it chose not to use its cash to pay interest, the lenders would have no choice but to accept more debt instead of money.

> Here more on this issue that didn´t matter just 60 days ago....Convenant Lite Loans & Toggle Bonds

> Hier mehr zu diesem Thema das bis vor 60 Tagen noch überhaupt kein Problem gewesen ist....Convenant Lite Loans & Toggle Bonds

Unfortunately for the banks, investors have been on a buyers' strike recently and have refused to buy debt that gives them few rights.

Need for Flexibility
The banks argued that if the target company was so weak that the buyers needed all that flexibility, and refused to put in any terms and conditions, they shouldn't be buying the company in the first place. The lenders initially asked the private-equity firms to guarantee the debt involved in the deal -- which the private-equity firms say they refused to do.

A recent report from Citigroup's banking analyst estimated that J.P. Morgan was holding $40.8 billion of leveraged buyout financing, some of which may wind up on the bank's balance sheet if it can't syndicate the deals.

'Market Out' Provision
The banks had been on uncertain legal ground in pushing for changes in their commitments, according to lawyers who were involved in the deal and many who weren't. Rushing to establish market share in the buyout business, they largely dropped many standard financing conditions in deals struck for private-equity clients in the past few years. For instance, few recent deals have carried an arcane provision known as the "market out" that previously had allowed banks to pull out of commitment if the general financing market deteriorated. Even conditions for declaring an "out" for a specific target company's performance had been tightly drawn for the banks -- in contrast to the strengthened flexibility of private-equity firms when it comes to the ability to renegotiate or walk away.

> Goldman, JPMorgan Stuck With Debt They Can't Sell to Investors

Just three of the 40 biggest pending LBOs have an escape clause that lets the buyer back out if funding can't be arranged,

The revised deal reduces the amount of debt the banks provided to about $6 billion. As part of the deal, the private-equity firms agreed to accept higher interest rates on portions of the debt, which offset some of the firms' other concessions. The buyout firms will write checks for almost $2.5 billion. The banks, in turn, will try to raise the $6 billion in debt from investors so they don't have to provide the entire sum themselves.

Most in the market still expect the bulk of the remaining private-equity deals to be completed. They point to HD Supply and the controversy around it as unusual for two reasons. It is one of the few deals in which the value of the equity as well as the debt involved in the deal was underwater, given the original $10.3 billion price tag, and is unlikely to be resold at anything near the current price anytime in the next few years.

Still, investors are warily trying to determine if other buyout deals might fall victim to similar problems. They have been scrutinizing real-estate-intensive deals, such as the pending buyout of Hilton Hotels Corp. and Harrah's Entertainment Inc., as well as radio broadcaster Clear Channel Communications Inc., whose sector has been hurt in recent weeks.

And they are already toting up losses that the banks will have to put on their books. In the $27 billion deal for First Data, for instance, some investors are figuring that the debt issued in connection with the deal is already worth 10% to 13% less than envisioned. That could mean seven banks sharing paper losses of more than $2 billion. The last-minute accord on the Home Depot's unit, with a reduction in the amount of debt, offers a potential road map for other deals that would avoid drastic write-downs.

U.S. Credit Perspectives / PIMCO

It is always good to hear what one of the biggest players is doing in such critical times. And i have to admit that since i followed the reports they have a really good track record. So i find it interesting to hear that PIMCO is now warming up to the secondary bank loan market ( probably like this one )and that they are still largely avoiding bonds from financials. Click on the headline to read the entire report.

Es kann nicht schaden wenn man zu hören bekommt was einer der größten Spieler im Kredit und Anleihemarkt zu sagen hat. Das gilt besonders dann wenn man wie Pimco in den letzten Jahren ziemlich ein extrem guten Track Record vorweisen kann. Besonders hervorzuheben ist hier das PIMCO wohl sein Engagement im sog. " Secondary Bank Loan Market" ausbauen will ( dieses hier könnte ein gutes Beipsiel sein ) und das Bonds von Finanzunternehmen noch immer extreme Risiken bergen. Klickt bitte auf die Überschrift um den kompletten report zu lesen.



To summarize, our firm’s view was that rising global liquidity was stimulating an aggressive search for yield which, when combined with rapid innovation in the structured credit markets, was leading to excesses that dislodged the fundamental link between the prices of assets and their underlying values in the corporate bond market. We noticed another discouraging trend as a growing number of private equity deals and aggressive corporate managers were piling more debt on balance sheets through leveraged buyouts (LBOs) and increasing shareholder-friendly initiatives such as share buybacks. Finally, the lack of covenant protection and the tight level of credit spreads (Chart 1) relative to history led us to under-weight investment-grade credit risk, and favor other asset classes where we felt returns would be higher and risks lower.

....The second bottom-up opportunity where PIMCO has benefited thanks to significant credit analysis from both our corporate and mortgage team has been our belief that the U.S. housing market would surprise on the downside. We have written extensively on our housing views and our positioning across PIMCO portfolios remains under-weight housing, sub-prime and cyclical credit risks. Rising inventories, tightening lending standards, and significant sub-prime and prime adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) resets were an early warning sign that prompted us to reduce housing and sub-prime mortgage exposure. Not surprisingly, the relationship between home prices and mortgage rates has changed amid falling prices and tightening credit conditions. The real mortgage rate (Chart 4), or the difference between the current 30-year mortgage rate and the year-over-year change in housing prices, has been rising sharply. Investors who moved into these asset classes without thoroughly analyzing risks are now clearly wishing they had done more bottom-up credit work. Fortunately, PIMCO’s bottom-up investment process prompted us to pro-actively steer our clients away from these risks.

Knowing when to avoid risk and play it conservatively, as in golf, is just as important as knowing when to take risk. At PIMCO, we saw opportunity in the energy sector and risk in the housing and homebuilder sector that markets were not priced to reflect. Fortunately for our clients with credit exposure, these bottom-up decisions have paid off as energy sharply outperformed homebuilders (Chart 5). In golf terms, our corporate bond, mortgage and credit teams have just hit a 3-wood 250 yards right on the green
Our current strategy will be to move a portion of our high-quality investments into more credit risk as opportunities present themselves. One opportunity may be in the bank loan market, which has re-priced significantly, and specifically in the credit default swap market which references bank loans. The loan credit default swap index (LCDX), which references a diversified basket of bank loan credit default swaps (LCDS), has gone from initial spreads of LIBOR+120 to over LIBOR+350 in roughly two months. This has caused the relationship of the spread on the high yield credit default swap index (HY CDX), which references a diversified portfolio of high yield CDS, and LCDX to change dramatically (Chart 6).

Banks hedging bridge loan commitments have likely influenced the move wider in LCDX and its recent underperformance versus HY CDX. Given the significant forward calendar of new issuance lined up to come to market, it is not surprising recent covenant-lite bonds and loans have come under pressure. Despite these near-term negative technical factors, our initial analysis of the putting green suggests bank loans, and specifically LCDX, have cheapened considerably.

Tightening credit conditions have also raised significant uncertainty about whether or not announced LBOs will get funded. Higher financing costs, due to tighter credit conditions and widening credit spreads, should reduce the momentum of future deals. The institutional forward loan calendar has grown significantly (Chart 7) and, as a result, the stock market could face increasing headwinds, with less aggressive private equity support and higher financing costs on future deals. In the bond market, tighter credit conditions, more robust covenant protection, and wider credit spreads are leading to opportunities for our clients. A recent bank loan deal with a spread of LIBOR+400 priced recently at a significant discount. This type of pricing is now giving us the opportunity to potentially earn significant returns on senior secured bank loans over the next several years.
PIMCO will seek to capitalize on selective opportunities in the new issue and secondary bank loan market now that terms are becoming more favorable for bondholders. Bank loans historically recover around 75% in the event of default due to senior positioning in the capital structure. Credit fundamentals remain healthy for a lot of companies, and bank loans are currently experiencing less than 1% default rates (Chart 8). What’s the big picture? At current spreads of roughly LIBOR+400, a diversified portfolio of bank loans would have to default at near 16%, assuming a 75% recovery rate, for an investor to break-even versus LIBOR. While bank loan defaults rose to 8% in 2000, a rise from the current level below 1% to anything remotely approaching 16% is highly unlikely. Clearly, technicals, not fundamentals, are driving spreads in the bank loan market.
Within the credit markets, another area of potential opportunity is in financials, which have sharply underperformed recently, with both banks and broker spreads (Chart 9) moving to levels not seen in over five years. Uncertainty surrounding sub-prime, housing and bridge loan exposure has changed the outlook for the financial sector.

While widening spreads in bank debt, bank capital securities and brokerage paper could represent opportunities, we are being highly selective in our bottom-up credit process to ensure we avoid unnecessary risks.