The parlous condition of the European banking system keeps coming back to haunt the global economy, with the latest attack of lurgy coming from Brexit. The UK electorate’s vote to leave the EU has laid bare the weak credit quality of lenders, a state of affairs that needed little revealing. Markit’s iTraxx Senior Financials index,…
Improved market sentiment boost 2Q16 leveraged market; Opportunistic deals resurface The market volatility that emerged at the tail end of 2015 and seeped into 1Q16, eased in 2Q – at least until the Brexit vote – allowing lenders to step back to assess their pipelines against the back drop of a stronger high yield bond…
The decline in US private equity activity deepens US private equity activity continues to fall. Even if Q2 numbers are revised upward as time goes on, with additional datapoints backfilled, a quarter-over-quarter decline will still have occurred in the first half of 2016. As of early July, completed deal count for Q2 is more in…
Private Debt Fundraising Shows Signs of Acceleration in Q2 Preqin’s quarterly fundraising update on the private debt industry finds that Q2 showed healthy signs of acceleration, boosting hopes the industry will return to the record fundraising levels seen over the twelve month period between Q4 2014 and Q3 2015. Over the quarter, 28 vehicles… Subscribe
Those of us who stayed up to watch the Brexit television coverage knew that in a few hours’ time the June 24 trading session would go down in history. The mainstream media were inevitably obsessing about the post-Brexit collapse in sterling, but the credit markets were focused on the Markit iTraxx indices. Big moves were…
Supported by solid technicals and a steady – if uninspired – pipeline of deals, the US loan market got a substantial boost in 2Q16 to push over US$550 billion in loan volume through the market and logging nearly US$905 billion of total issuance during the first six months of the year. Coming off a slow…
Recent Wave of Exits Differentiated U.S. PE Fund Managers The boom in private equity-backed selling observed over the past few years, cresting in 2015, yielded rich returns for certain U.S. buyout funds. More than that, it proved a differentiating area for the top tier of U.S. fund managers. As illustrated by the chart above, certain…
Credit Hedge Fund Performance in 2016 YTD The first months of 2016 were characterised by continued market volatility, and credit-focused hedge funds recorded losses across all sub-strategies in January and February. However, as global turbulence has calmed moving into Q2, all sub-strategies have seen improved performing and posted three consecutive months of gains… Subscribe to
The campaign for the UK to leave the European Union has lost momentum with in the lead-up to Thursday’s vote, and the credit market has been re-pricing to reflect these developments. The UK’s five year CDS spreads, which had touched yearly wides off the back of the surging “leave” sentiment last week, have been the…
Survey: Where are we in the credit cycle? Thirty-nine percent of buyside and sellside institutions in the room at Fitch Ratings and Thomson Reuters LPC’s Loan & CLO Conference last Thursday felt that we are already headed into a correction and in the late stages of the credit cycle, up from just 4% in both…