TwentyFour

Since the start of the year credit markets have been very well supported, reversing much of the sharp period of spread widening we experienced in the final quarter of 2018.

The ECB published the result of its Supervisory Review and Evaluation Process (SREP) yesterday, which increased the average capital requirements for European banks, and overall, increased the average SREP requirement by approx. 100bps.

Deoleo is a Spanish olive oil company that people will know from its brands like Bertolli. It’s long been considered to be one of the “idiosyncratic” stories in the European leverage loan market. The deal has an 85m revolver, a 55m second lien tranche and widely traded 460m senior secured tranche.

One of the challenges that banks face when considering the re-financing of AT1 capital is market timing. Treasurers have to answer the question whether to issue when market conditions are supportive, which may result in a considerable period when they have two overlapping securities (adding to their interest overhead); or wait to refinance just before the call date, which of course increases the risk of having to issue in a market demanding more punitive terms.

The period following the full year results releases from the banks is typically followed by large volumes of subordinated bond supply from the banks. This year is no exception as the pace of new issues is ramping up, in particular in the higher beta Additional Tier 1 (AT1) securities; colloquially known as Coco bonds. Already this week there have been new benchmark issues from BBVA, Barclays and BNP, taking 2019 issuance to date in this sector to a total of €14 bn.

he first quarter of 2019 is coming to an end and after a bumpy end to 2018 we did not expect to see a lot of issuance of new CLOs once the pipeline had cleared. But although CLO debt remains expensive for equity investors (arbitrage has only gotten worse as the leverage loan supply is still slow) there seems to be no end to new deals coming to the market. There are a few things that for us as debt investors stood out; the strong Japanese bid for AAAs, structural differences, varied pricing and spreads that have not recovered as quickly as for similarly rated corporate bonds.

The big monetary policy event over the month was the increase of monetary stimulus announced by the ECB after two years of slowly weaning the Eurozone off extremely easy money. At the ECB meeting of Thursday the 7th of March Mario Draghi announced the introduction of new TLTRO (the last round ended in December 2018, so this is TLTRO III) and interest rates guidance was modified for the current levels to remain to the end of 2019 (previously mid 2019). Market consensus is for an even longer pause.

One of the elements we look at on our dashboard that guides us on the state of the economic cycle is credit rating migration. We look at spread movements too, but rating change gives us another line into the risk that rated entities are taking or are confronted with. While we recognise that rating change is a backward looking indicator, viewed in conjunction with other measures, it is possible to draw some important conclusions.

Investors decided fairly early this year that, with the help of a dovish Federal Reserve, the big negative move of Q4 2018 was not signalling the beginning of the end, and was instead a dip to be taken advantage of. The rally since has barely paused for breath, with a sustained and broad-based recovery taking hold.

We wrote a blog a month ago, “January: the Month of ABS-tinence”, about the level of new issuance in the European ABS market, and the slightly counter-intuitive impact it was having.

For fixed income investors, it has been impossible to ignore the proliferation of press coverage about the growth of the triple-B rated corporate bond market, and a coming wave of downgrades for companies rated BBB to high yield, with these ‘fallen angels’ exposing investors to mark-to-market losses at best, and defaults at worst.

Investors have rightly been concerned about the coordinated global economic slowdown, but in Europe it has been worse than that with the major economies flirting with recession. Consequently investors have been cautious on European assets, but has this caution now reached its peak?