With some anxiety, we watched our five-year-old daughter walk up to the school bus yesterday morning, on her way to the first day of kindergarten. As she climbed aboard, we overheard one of her classmates ask, “Is that your grandfather?” As a pesky questioner ourselves, we admired the young boy’s pluck. Although it injected a…
As we reach our end of August break, it is an annual tradition here at The Lead Left to give readers our recommended summer reading list. Based on our perusal of the best-sellers that went to the beach house in Quogue, or were pool-side at Watch Hill, or on blankets at the Cape, see below for our candidates…
How many readers remember this classic Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello beach party vehicle from 1965? We think any movie with Buster Keaton, Don Rickles, and Linda Evans (as Candy Kane) in the same cast deserves special mention in a summertime column devoted to odd pairings. We also couldn’t help wondering what an updated version of that…
Predictions are tough, especially about the future. And after Thursday’s Dow tumble, it’s hard to dismiss outright doomsday forecasts that a credit apocalypse is coming soon. For leveraged lending bubble busters, their canaries in the capital coal mine are leveraged statistics. Are we past 2007’s high-water mark? To be sure, we’re hearing our share of…
“What’s the definition of an overheated market? One loan and two lenders.” That’s the supply/demand conundrum in the leveraged loan market today. While institutional and retail cash have certainly re-entered the asset class with vigor since the credit crisis, overall levels are not more than those enjoyed during 2007. Indeed, the short-term outlook might see…
One of the most noted stories of the current loan market is the amount of investor cash that has re-entered the asset class since 2010. While it certainly has produced eye-catching frothiness, how does this liquidity compare with the definitional froth of 2007? In our just-published series on the role of CLOs in both past…
What is the scariest sentence in the English language? If you’re a parent dropping off your four-year old at summer camp (as we did last Friday), a good candidate is, “Daddy, today we’re learning archery!” For bankers monitoring leveraged markets these days, it seems like the equivalent phrase of fear is, “We are back to…
They’re big, they’re bad, and now that they’re back, the end of the world is upon us. No, we’re not referring to the latest Transformers instalment: Age of Extinction.Though we’re compelled to point out that seems an equally appropriate headline for the obituary so many market observers seem eager to write about CLOs’ demise-by-Dodd-Frank. But just as…
Until recently, institutional investors have always had a love-hate relationship with the middle market – minus the love. Compared to reassuringly large, liquid credits, companies with less than $50 million in Ebitda tend to be private, their debt unrated, their businesses niche-oriented, their access to public markets limited, and their management teams entrepreneurially lean. Further,…
After publication last week, we were concerned we had been a bit rough on our bank friends in dismissing the ability of regulated institutions to adapt as readily as CLO’s when loans became troubled. An informal survey of those friends revealed that, if anything, we had been too generous. “You were spot on with your…