The “credit cycle” begins to unravel.
One of the big indicators of the end of the “credit cycle” is the number of bankruptcies. During good times, so earlier in the credit cycle, companies borrow money. Then, overconfident and lured by low interest rates and overoptimistic rosy-scenario rhetoric emanating from all sides, they do what the Fed and Wall-Street firms want them to do: they borrow even more money. Then reality sets in, and they buckle under this pile of debt.
The bankruptcy filings of Ultra Petroleum and Midstates Petroleum on Friday and Saturday brought oil & gas bankruptcies of companies rated by Fitch and other ratings agencies to 59. These two companies piled $3.1 billion in defaulted junk bonds and another $1.5 billion in defaulted loans on top of the growing mountain of defaulted oil & gas debt.
With these two bankruptcies, Fitch Ratings raised its high-yield energy default rate to an all-time record of 13% and now projects that by the end of 2016, this default rate will jump to an even more glorious record of 20%.
But it’s not just oil and gas. And it’s not just companies whose bonds and loans are traded and are rated by Fitch and other ratings agencies. These are the larger outfits – big enough to have bondholders and big enough for the financial media to report.
But bankruptcies of all kinds and sizes and in a wide variety of sectors are now soaring.
Total US commercial bankruptcy filings in April rose 3% from March and soared 32% from a year ago, to 3,482, the American Bankruptcy Institute just reported. It was the sixth month in a row of year-over-year increases.
Of these commercial bankruptcies in April, 680 were Chapter 11 filings, up 67% year-over-year! The rest were liquidations. And the pace is quickening: In just one month, from 450 in March, Chapter 11 filings have skyrocketed 51%!
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