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Discussion Paper
Investigating the Trading Activity of CLO Portfolio Managers
Unlike mortgage-backed and home equity-backed securities, collateralized loan obligations (CLOs), whose collateral is predominantly corporate loans, are slowly but steadily recovering. This revival, illustrated in the chart below, spotlights again a sector of nonagency structured finance that has been scrutinized for its investment practices. This post investigates the trading activities of CLO collateral managers. Understanding their investment strategies is crucial to assessing their effectiveness as financial intermediaries, including their role in financing leveraged buyouts, corporate ...
Working Paper
Leveraged Bank Loan versus High Yield Bond Mutual Funds
Since the financial crisis, the markets for Bank Loan (BL) and High Yield Bond (HYB) mutual funds (MFs) have grown significantly, with assets under management increasing from $19 billion and $75 billion to close to $117 billion and $225 billion, respectively, as of December 2018. This short paper characterizes the universe of BL MFs and compare it against that of HYB MFs on several dimensions. We document that BL and HYB MFsâ?? respective market share of leverage loans (LL) and high yield (HY) corporate bonds outstanding increased since the mid-2000s. We also show that in terms of portfolio ...
Report
Liquidity Transformation Risks in U.S. Bank Loan and High-Yield Mutual Funds
In this note, we examine the liquidity profiles of a sample of bank loan and high-yield open-end mutual funds. Among other things, we find that the ten largest bank loan mutual funds have increased their holdings of the hardest-to-value, generally most illiquid assets over the past decade.
Working Paper
Pipeline Risk in Leveraged Loan Syndication
Leveraged term loans are typically arranged by banks but distributed to institutional investors. Using novel data, we find that to elicit investors' willingness to pay, arrangers expose themselves to pipeline risk: They have to retain larger shares when investors are willing to pay less than expected. We argue that the retention of such problematic loans creates a debt overhang problem. Consistent with this, we find that the materialization of pipeline risk for an arranger reduces its subsequent arranging and lending activity. Aggregate time series exhibit a similar pattern, which suggests ...
Working Paper
What Do Lead Banks Learn from Leveraged Loan Investors?
In leveraged loan deals, lead banks use bookbuilding to extract price-relevant information from syndicate participants. This paper examines the content of such information. We find that pricing adjustments during bookbuilding are highly informative, not only about investors’ required risk premium but also about borrower quality. A one-percentage-point increase in loan spread predicts a 0.8% higher excess return, a proxy for risk premium, over the first 3 months of secondary market trading. More importantly, it also predicts a 3% higher probability of subsequent default, implying that ...
Report
Macroprudential policy and the revolving door of risk: lessons from leveraged lending guidance
We investigate the U.S. experience with macroprudential policies by studying the interagency guidance on leveraged lending. We find that the guidance primarily impacted large, closely supervised banks, but only after supervisors issued important clarifications. It also triggered a migration of leveraged lending to nonbanks. While we do not find that nonbanks had more lax lending policies than banks, we unveil important evidence that nonbanks increased bank borrowing following the issuance of guidance, possibly to finance their growing leveraged lending. The guidance was effective at reducing ...