“Pain, Pain, Pain”: A Distressed Investing Icon’s Dire Take On The Next Credit Crisis
by Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge.com
Sun, 01/06/2019
Two icons of distressed investing – Bruce Richards and Lou Hanover, who together run the $15 billion Marathon Asset Management – gave a lengthy interview to Barron’s last week, in which they laid out their views for 2019, and perhaps surprisingly had a generally sanguine “best case” outlook for the asset class that makes up their bread and butter, namely junk bonds, saying that “high yield should do pretty well, contrary to what most people think. Because growth rates are at 2% and earnings are still improving, default rates will remain low. Spreads are blowing out already; now you’re getting paid 7-7.5% yield. You may not earn the full 7, 7.5%, but we think you’ll earn 3 to 5.”
The distressed duo also noted their preferred investment for 2019, saying that while emerging markets are the most volatile of all the credit markets, their “top expected return for this year is playing Argentina” which based on how much it backed up last year, “it’s offering very, very good value.”
It’s not until you have some more certainty around Macri and this election [in October] that you want to start to deploying capital aggressively. Right now, for a trade, we’re beginning to buy.
That said, there are distinct risks to their outlook, with Richards and Hanover noting the following four major risk factors:
No. 1: Is the Fed moving too aggressively?
No. 2, inflation expectations.
No. 3, will negotiations with China turn into an all-out trade war, where the impact to the economy could be at least 50 basis points of GDP.
No. 4, Europe: is it hard Brexit? Is it Italian recession? Is the transition from Merkel going smoothly? In the latest quarter, German GDP really slowed. Will the yellow jackets in France gain prominence and try for political change? Then there is Mario Draghi and the ECB: one of our top expectations for next year is that European investment grade and high yield become considerably cheaper because the ECB moves from QE to a neutral stance when they begin raising rates. Europe needs an easy policy, but the zero rate environment is creating some other issues, like bubbles in some of the sovereigns.
Also, following the recent rout in investment grade bonds, which have “gotten clobbered” Marathon likes it, even if they remain concerned about the BBB-tranche “There was $760 billion of BBB U.S. corporate bonds in year-end ‘07. Today, that’s $3.15 trillion.”
As a result, Marathon is starting to set up a basket of shorts in BBBs, in bonds, and CDS: “We’re focused on investment grade, the most highly leveraged single-names.”
Meanwhile, while generally sanguine on High Yield, Marathon lays out a laundry list of key concerns involving high yield bonds, starting with the fact that the vast majority of debt nowadays is covenant lite. And, as a result of this prepondrance of covenant-lite debt, Richards forecasts that default rates will stay well lower than prior distressed cycles, largely as a result of reduced negotiating leverage that creditors have, however, once defaults do hit eventually, the result will be far lower recovery rates “because they’ve eaten away a lot of value.”
The Rest…HERE
