Fixed Income

In the past few weeks CLOs have become the focus of much attention, both from market participants and the media, especially following the negative rating actions that agencies have taken on the underlying loans as well as CLO tranches.

As regular readers of this blog will know, TwentyFour has adopted ESG integration throughout its investment process for all strategies, and launched its first sustainable fund offering in January 2020. In doing so, we have engaged in some fascinating debates with clients and peers about the growing impact of ESG objectives on the fund management industry, and on fixed income markets in particular. Here are a few of our predictions for the years ahead.

A few weeks ago Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s CEO, Brian Moynihan, said that loan losses were not coming through as thick or as fast as he would normally expect for a recession, in particular a recession of this magnitude.

There have been two topics concerning the yield curve in the press over the last few days, which we think merit closer attention. As regular readers will know, the US yield curve in particular is closely followed by market participants and can dictate a lot of what happens in fixed income markets globally.

Markets opened today to the news that German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, and French President, Emmanuel Macron, had reached an agreement to support the launch of a €500bn support package to aid the European Union’s recovery from the coronavirus outbreak, which has devastated large parts of the continent.

European ABS primary markets re-opened late last week with the pricing of the first publicly syndicated deal since recent events took hold of global financial markets. Long-standing issuer BMW priced a 1.6-year AAA German Auto ABS deal at three-month Euribor +40bp, having increased the size of the deal to €700m and finishing around 1.7x oversubscribed.

Thursday saw the reopening of the bond market for bank Additional Tier 1 (AT1) debt, more colloquially known as ‘Coco’ bonds.

A lot has been made of the recent recovery in equity markets, especially in the US, given the obvious underlying weaknesses in the economy. It is quite clear to us the economic fundamentals do not justify such high valuations in risk assets, but despite being a serious consideration in our assessment, there is often much more to valuations than just fundamentals.

One of the big support mechanisms for the UK economy during this pandemic has been the availability of grants and corporate loans via the banking system, aided by unlimited liquidity from the central bank.

After six weeks of no supply, the market somewhat surprisingly reopened with three new issue CLOs being priced last week and a new one already on the way. We are aware of many loan warehouses that need to be cleared, and bankers (or rather their risk managers) are no doubt keen for CLO managers to refinance leveraged loans into a CLO.

The list of policy actions from the major central banks keeps getting longer, and today the Bank of Japan has added the purchase of “as many Japanese government bonds (JGBs) as necessary” so as to keep the 10-year rate at around zero percent.

We engage with Santander as a debt issuer across many jurisdictions and various fixed income products, and we have had mixed views on the bank’s behaviour in recent years following a controversial approach to a 2018 AT1 refinancing and the exercise of an early call in a Spanish ABS deal in 2019. On both these occasions, we felt bondholders were treated poorly and this was reflected in our ESG analysis of the issuer.