Financial bubbles are the office Christmas parties of the investment
world. They start slowly, with a certain amount of anxiety. But they end
wildly, with acts and decisions that in retrospect seem really, really
stupid.
Millions of people out there still bear the psychic scars of buying
gold at $800/oz in 1980 or a tech stock at 1,000 times earnings in 1999
or a Miami condo for $1,000 per square foot in 2006.
Today’s bubble will leave some similar marks. But where those
previous bubbles were narrowly focused on a single asset class, this one
is so broad-based that the hangover is likely to be epic in both scope
and cumulative embarrassment.
This series will create a paper trail for the morning after, starting
with a truly amazing anomaly: European junk bonds now yield less than
US Treasury bonds.
(Financial Times) – High-yield debt belies its name as loose central
bank policy skews credit markets The European high-yield market has seen
€82bn of new issuance so far this year
A widely tracked index of European junk bonds is on the verge of
breaking below the 2 per cent yield barrier for the first time, the
latest indication that loose central bank policy has skewed credit
markets.
The so-called “yield-to-worst” on ICE Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s
euro high-yield index slipped to just 2.002 per cent on Thursday, an
all-time low for what is the most commonly used benchmark in the
European junk bond market.
The index is comprised of debt sold by companies whose credit ratings
are on average below the investment grade threshold. The yield on the
index was as high as 6.4 per cent as recently as January 2016, when a
global sell-off in riskier assets severely knocked demand for European
high-yield bonds.
Shortly after that, in March 2016, the European Central Bank
announced it would buy investment grade rated corporate bonds under its
quantitative easing programme for first time, kick-starting a strong
rally in European credit.
The central bank has since purchased over €100bn of corporate bonds,
which investors say has pushed investment grade bond fund managers to
increasingly buy double-B rated bonds — the highest-rated category of
junk bond. These double-B bonds make up around three-quarters of the
European high-yield index.
“It’s really the double-Bs that are skewing the index, particularly
after the latest ECB meeting,” said David Newman, head of global high
yield at Allianz Global Investors. While the index’s yield is the lowest
its ever been, the spread over government bonds is still higher than at
the peak of the last credit boom. The index offers 240 basis points
over government bonds at present, compared with just 178 basis points in
mid-2007.
ICE BoAML’s euro double-B index offers a spread over government bonds
of just 197 basis points, however. Mr Newman said analysis from Allianz
shows the so-called “illiquidity premium” that investors usually demand
to hold riskier high-yield paper has been closer to 300bp historically.
“So at current double-B spreads you’re not being compensated for the
illiquidity premium, let alone any defaults,” Mr Newman said. “There’s
no margin for error basically.”
The collapse in yields has spurred record issuance of European
high-yield bonds with Italian telecommunications group Wind Tre last
week selling the largest euro junk bond on record.
The European high-yield market has seen €82bn of new issuance so far
this year, according to JPMorgan credit analysts, which they note is
“within touching distance” of the previous full-year record of €84bn set
in 2014. The analysts add that the net supply figure is “still
subdued”, however, particularly as a red hot market for leveraged loans
has seen many companies replaced their bonds with loans instead.
Many investors are worried that this squeeze on net supply is
spurring excessive risk taking, with a string of formerly distressed
companies in the volatile retail sector recently raising new bonds, for
example.
“We’re going to break through 2 per cent on the index any day
now,” said a credit analyst at an asset manager. “It’s difficult to be
bearish in this market and unfortunately people are getting rewarded for
being long the riskiest credits.”
There are so many terrifying factoids and data points in this article that it’s hard to know where to begin.
But the overriding theme is financial excess, beginning with
governments that have overborrowed to the point that they can only
function in a world where money is free.
This requires them to force down all interest rates by flooding the
system with newly created currency, which then has to go somewhere.
Everyone from money managers required to beat a target rate of return to
retirees who need
something on which to live are thus forced to lend money to crappy, high-risk companies.
This leads those companies — no fools despite their ugly balance
sheets and/or anemic cash flows — to give the suckers what they want in
the form of unlimited new borrowing.
The net result: A society that becomes more highly-leveraged by the day, in a classic Austrian School of Economics Ponzi finance orgy.
Or, to return to the opening metaphor, the final hour of a party with an open bar.
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John Rubino runs the popular financial website DollarCollapse.com. He is co-author, with GoldMoney’s James Turk, of The Money Bubble (DollarCollapse Press, 2014) and The Collapse of the Dollar and How to Profit From It (Doubleday, 2007), and author of Clean Money: Picking Winners in the Green-Tech Boom (Wiley, 2008), How to Profit from the Coming Real Estate Bust (Rodale, 2003) and Main Street, Not Wall Street(Morrow, 1998). After earning a Finance MBA from New York University, he spent the 1980s on Wall Street, as a Eurodollar trader, equity analyst and junk bond analyst. During the 1990s he was a featured columnist with TheStreet.com and a frequent contributor to Individual Investor, Online Investor, and Consumers Digest, among many other publications. He currently writes for CFA Magazine.
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