Who Will Suffer from a Leveraged Credit Shakeout? | Enterprising Investor.
Of all the noteworthy moments from the 2014 CFA Institute Fixed-Income Management Conference, the bombshell may have been the default call from Martin S. Fridson, CFA.
Fridson, CIO at Lehmann Livian Fridson Advisors, has been a leading figure in the high-yield bond market since it was known as the “junk bond” market — and he sees as much as $1.6 trillion in high-yield defaults coming in a surge he expects to begin soon.
“And this is not based on an apocalyptic forecast,” he assured the audience.
High-yield bonds, typically issued with credit ratings at the bottom of the scale, tend to suffer default surges during troughs in the credit cycle. The first high-yield default surge occurred from 1989 to 1992, and encompassed the collapse of Drexel Burnham Lambert. The second surge ran from 1999 to 2003, following the bursting of the dot-com bubble, and the third happened in the midst of the global financial crisis, from 2008 to 2009.
Fridson suggests the next default surge will be larger than the last three combined. Each surge saw an average annual high-yield default rate above 7% (which, if extended over a multi-year period, can add up to real money).
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