That worrying wall of debt
By Vipal Monga
Published June 5, 2009 at 11:59 AM
The leveraged loan market got accustomed to big numbers over the past decade. There’s $3.6 trillion, the amount of leveraged loans made since 2000, according to Thomson Reuters’ Loan Pricing Corp. There’s 735-fold, the amount of growth between 2003 and 2007 in the volume of collateralized loan obligations — the funds that helped fuel the loan market’s surge after the tech and telecom bust of 2001. And there’s $375 billion, the amount of bank debt used to fund leveraged buyouts completed between 2005 and 2007.
But right now, the leveraged loan market is fixated on one number: $430 billion, the amount in leveraged loans due to mature between 2012 and 2014. Despite the big numbers of the past, this might be simply too big. Indeed, the $430 billion figure is already worrying lenders, borrowers and loan-market investors alike as they struggle with the possibility that a large portion of those loans will neither be repaid nor refinanced, raising the specter of a wave of defaults among the debt-fueled LBO borrowers of 2005 through 2007.
“People are in a panic about it right now,” says one lawyer who specializes in corporate finance. “There’s not enough capacity to refinance this.”
Is the panic justified?
Standing where we are today, it certainly seems as though the looming maturities will break upon an already fragile market, causing further damage and potentially extending the crisis. But just how serious a threat the maturities pose is an open question. Markets are dynamic, ever-evolving systems, and it’s virtually certain the conditions that exist today will have changed substantially, even fundamentally, tomorrow. As Alexander Gendzier, capital markets lawyer at Jones Day, says, “2012 is a couple of lifetimes from where we are today.”
