Goldilocks is back, better watch out

It’s official: Goldilocks is back, at least for junk bonds, according to a JPM analyst quoted in Bloomberg:

March 29 (Bloomberg) — Junk bond sales reached a record this month as rising profits and record low Federal Reserve interest rates foster lending and investment to the lowest-rated borrowers.

Companies worldwide issued $38.3 billion of junk bonds in March, passing the previous high of $36 billion in November 2006, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Yields fell 0.95 percentage point to within 5.96 percentage points of government debt, the narrowest gap since January 2008, Bank of America Merrill Lynch index data show.

This is “an almost ‘Goldilocks’ environment for leveraged credit markets,” JPMorgan Chase & Co. analysts led by Peter Acciavatti, the top-ranked high-yield strategist in Institutional Investor magazine’s annual survey for the past seven years, said in a March 26 report to the bank’s clients.

Sales soared as investors plowed a record $33.6 billion into speculative-grade funds this quarter, according to Cambridge, Massachusetts-based research firm EPFR Global. Bonds of Stamford, Connecticut-based Frontier Communications Corp. and Consol Energy Inc. of Pittsburgh, which sold a combined $5.95 billion of debt last week, rose about 2 cents on the dollar to 102 cents.

That’s a turnaround from February, when companies canceled sales at the fastest pace since credit markets began to freeze in 2007 amid concern that the inability of European governments to trim their budget deficits will threaten a global recovery.

Loan Revival

About $20 billion of high-yield, or leveraged, loans have been completed in February and March, compared with $38 billion for all of 2009, according to New York-based JPMorgan. Speculative-grade securities are rated below Baa3 by Moody’s Investors Service and BBB- by Standard & Poor’s.

Elsewhere in credit markets, yield spreads for company bonds shrank by an average 3 basis points last week to 151 basis points, or 1.51 percentage points, the narrowest since November 2007, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Global Broad Market Corporate Index. Yields rose to 4.02 percent from 3.98 percent. …

Looks like credit investors are “all-in” again, just like the stock market crowd. This never ends well.

…“Appetite is definitely there,” said Joel Levington, director of corporate credit for Brookfield Investment Management Inc. in New York, which has $24 billion in assets under management.

Sales of high-yield bonds in March more than doubled last month’s total of $16 billion, driving issuance this year to $78.5 billion, the busiest quarter on record, Bloomberg data show. High-yield companies, taking advantage of the lower borrowing costs, said they planned to repay debt with proceeds from at least $20 billion of this month’s sales.

“The mindset of investors is that this spread product is ideally situated for this kind of macro environment,” said Charles Himmelberg, the chief credit strategist at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in New York.

Just what macro environment might that be? Silly me, I thought we were sliding down the backside of a credit bubble.

2012-2014, the Maturity Wall

According to the NYTimes, $700 billion in high-yeild corporates mature from 2012 to 2014:

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More from the Times article:

With huge bills about to hit corporations and the federal government around the same time, the worry is that some companies will have trouble getting new loans, spurring defaults and a wave of bankruptcies.

The United States government alone will need to borrow nearly $2 trillion in 2012, to bridge the projected budget deficit for that year and to refinance existing debt.

Indeed, worries about the growth of national, or sovereign, debt prompted Moody’s Investors Service to warn on Monday that the United States and other Western nations were moving “substantially” closer to losing their top-notch Aaa credit ratings…

Sovereign debt aside, the approaching scramble for corporate financing could strain the broader economy as jobs are cut, consumer spending is scaled back and credit is tightened for both consumers and businesses.

Private equity firms and many nonfinancial companies were able to borrow on easy terms until the credit crisis hit in 2007, but not until 2012 does the long-delayed reckoning begin for a series of leveraged buyouts and other deals that preceded the crisis.

That is because the record number of bonds and loans that were issued to finance those transactions typically come due in five to seven years, said Diane Vazza, head of global fixed-income research at Standard & Poor’s.

In addition, she said, many companies whose debt matured in 2009 and 2010 have been able to extend their loans, but the extra breathing room is only adding to the bill for 2012 and after.

The result is a potential financial doomsday, or what bond analysts call a maturity wall. From $21 billion due this year, junk bonds are set to mature at a rate of $155 billion in 2012, $212 billion in 2013 and $338 billion in 2014.

The credit markets have gradually returned to normal since the financial crisis, particularly in recent months, making more loans available to companies and signaling confidence in the pace of economic recovery. But the issue is whether they can absorb the coming surge in demand for credit.

“Returned to normal” apparently means lending money to people who can’t pay it back. And of course junk bonds are just part of the debt load:

TheTreasury Department estimates that the federal budget deficit in 2012 will total $974 billion, down from this year’s $1.8 trillion, but still huge by historical standards.

Next in line are companies with investment-grade credit ratings. They must refinance $1.2 trillion in loans between 2012 and 2014, including $526 billion in 2012. Finally, there is the looming rollover of commercial mortgage-backed securities, which will double in the next three years, hitting $59.7 billion in 2012.

Even if most of the debt does get refinanced, companies may have to pay more, if heavy government borrowing causes rates for all borrowers to rise.

“These are huge numbers,” said Tom Atteberry, who manages $5.6 billion in bonds for First Pacific Advisors, and is particularly alarmed by Washington’s borrowing. “Other players will get crowded out or have to pay significantly more, because the government is borrowing so much.”

Most critics of deficit spending have focused on the budget gap alone, but Washington will actually have to borrow $1.8 trillion in 2012, because $859 billion in old bonds will come due and have to be refinanced in addition to the deficit. By 2013 and 2014, $1.4 trillion will have to be raised annually.

In the late 1990s, the federal government ran a surplus and actually paid down a small portion of the national debt. But with the huge deficits of the last few years, the national debt has grown to more than $12 trillion.

All this debt is simply unpayable, and soon unserviceable. There is no solution but default. When the government bumps up against the limits of its credit, that will be the coup de grace.

Keep an eye on the junk:quality ratio

Put this down in the list of no-fuss, no-brainer, long-term trades. Simply buy 10-year Treasury notes and short junk bonds. There is no purer deflation play than this. It doesn’t even matter if Treasury yields rise (unlikely anytime soon IMO), since you’re playing the spread and junk yields will always include Treasury yields plus a risk premium.

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What are some other such no brainers for deflation? The closer something is to cash, the better.

- Long gold, short stocks. (Remember, I’m a gold bear for 2010).

- Long gold, short a basket of commodities (silver, platinum, copper, zinc, lead, oil, sugar, lumber, grains, etc).

- Long Treasuries (2, 5, 10), short stocks. This bet is safer the shorter the duration of the treasuries, but to make it work with short-dated notes, you’d have to go long a greater notional value of Treasuries than stocks. This is easy with futures: for example, for every $1M short in ES (S&P500), go long $3M ZF (5-year notes).

- Long US dollar, short hot “developing nation” or commodity nation currencies (Brazil, Australia, Canada, Russia, India, South Africa, etc).

- For later, not just yet: long 5-year treasuries, short 30-year.

- The most hard-core deflation trade of all: long stacks of $100 USD notes, short everything else, or safer yet, don’t even bother with the trading. Just wait for the market to make you an offer you can’t refuse, like a 10% dividend yield on the S&P, or $0.30 copper, $20 oil or $0.05 sugar.

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To make the spread trades work, you’d have to watch your margins, set loose stops and then just leave the trades to do their thing for the next 2-5 years.

Bonds vs. stocks

New lows for stocks overnight, and new highs for bonds (man, do I wish I hadn’t gone flat yesterday afternoon). By the way, that fractal played out, since the small decline into the close yesterday foretold a greater decline overnight.

S&P futures in white, 30-year treasury futures in blue here. You can see that they have each formed a megaphone pattern. We’ll see if they respect them today or slice right through in a panic.

Source: Interactive Brokers

And for those who are waiting with baited breath for the long bond to collapse, consider this 3-month chart of futures for 30, 10, 5 and 2 year treasuries. They all still move together, and they all go up as stocks go down.

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But of course risky debt moves opposite to treasuries — just when you most need bonds for safety, it trades like the stock market. Here’s a 3-month shot of TLT (blue, 20-30 year T-bonds), JNK (red, junk bonds) and HYD (green, high-yield munis):

Source: Yahoo! Finance

Another good week for bond spreads

Bonds are a key indicator of the health of the risk trade. So long as treasuries are shunned and junk is bid, it is likely that stocks and the commodity complex hold up. This week, long-dated Treasuries have gained a couple more points as junk bonds continued to lose their mojo:

Source: google finance

Here are the same ETFs going back to the start of the bear market in stocks. You can see that despite a huge correction in 2009, treasuries are still over 20% ahead of junk:

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The collapse of the long bond has been eagerly awaited since 2007, and TBT (the 2X short bond fund) is still often mentioned in online chatter. The crowd is almost never right about these things, so I suspect that T-bonds will remain strong for the next leg down in stocks.

2008 was just been the “first look” at what can happen in the aftermath of a debt bubble — why couldn’t the same price action continue as risk in priced in again? Even if 2008 turns out to have been the “Prechter point” of greatest recognition and panic (and not what is coming), I doubt that many final price extremes were set last year.

For the yeild on the long bond, at the very least I expect another dip into the sub-3.5% area (it’s 4.5% now, and it touched 2.5% a year ago). Then we can talk about setting up long-term short positions for a secular (15-30 year) bear market.

At any rate, if think yields are going up from here, you’ve got much better odds with shorting corporate or municipal bonds, since those things are priced for perfection and defaults are going to be rampant. Even if treasury yields stay flat or go up, weak credit should collapse.

Oh, and if you just can’t wait to short long-dated sovereign debt, how about Japan at 2%? Or Greece at 6%? Or Spain, Italy, Ireland… all of this stuff is in trouble. Why pick the senior currency?