'Commercial mortgage bonds are getting stuffed with the lowest-quality loans since the financial crisis by one measure, according to Moody’s Investors Service, a warning sign that the $517 billion market may be headed for harder times.
The securities are backed by as many interest-only mortgages as they were in late 2006 and early 2007, Moody’s said. Those loans are riskier because borrowers don’t pay any principal early in the debt’s life. When that period expires, the property owners are on the hook for much higher payments.'
- Claire Boston,
It’s 2007 Again for Commercial Mortgage Bonds, Moody’s Says, June 1, 2018
'The hallmark of an economic Ponzi scheme is that the operation of the economy relies on the constant creation of low-grade debt in order to finance consumption and income shortfalls among some members of the economy, using the massive surpluses earned by other members of the economy. The debt burdens, speculation, and skewed valuations most responsible for today’s lopsided prosperity are exactly the seeds from which the next crisis will spring.''Consider two economic systems.
In one, consumers work for employers to produce products and services. The employees are paid wages and salaries, and business owners earn profits. They use much of that income to purchase the goods and services produced by the economy. They save the remainder. A certain portion of the output represents “investment” goods, which are not consumed, and the portion of income not used for consumption – what we call “saving” – is used to directly or indirectly purchase those investment goods.
There may be some goods that are produced and are not purchased, in which case they become unintended “inventory investment,” but in a general sense, this first economic system is a well-functioning illustration of what we call “circular flow” or “general equilibrium.” As is always the case in the end, income equals expenditure, savings equal investment, and output is absorbed either as consumption or investment.
The second economic system is dysfunctional. Consumers work for employers to produce goods and services, but because of past labor market slack, weak bargaining power, and other factors, they are paid meaningfully less than they actually need to meet their consumption plans. The government also runs massive deficits, partly to supplement the income and medical needs of the public, partly to purchase goods and services from corporations, and partly to directly benefit corporations by cutting taxes on profits (despite being the only country in the OECD where corporations pay no value-added tax).
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Prioritizing market internals ahead of “overvalued, overbought, overbullish” syndromes addresses the difficulty we encountered in this cycle, yet also preserves the considerations that effectively allowed us to anticipate the 2000-2002 and 2007-2009 collapses.
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Moody’s observed last week that since 2009, the number of global nonfinancial companies rated as speculative or junk has surged by 58%, to the highest proportion in history. Despite the low rate of defaults at present, Moody’s warns that future periods of economic stress will cause a “particularly large” wave of defaults (h/t Lisa Abramowicz, Jeff Cox).
The expansion of junk and near-junk credit has again extended to commercial mortgage bonds, where interest-only loans now account for over 75% of the underlying debt. Bloomberg notes that “as investors have flocked to debt investments that seem safe, underwriters have been emboldened to make the instruments riskier and keep yields relatively high by removing or watering down protections.”
Similar deterioration is evident in the $1 trillion market for leveraged loans (loans to already heavily indebted borrowers), where “covenant lite” loans, which offer fewer protections to lenders in the event of default, now account for 77% of loans. Leveraged loans are catching up to the U.S. high-yield market, which accounts for another $1.2 trillion in debt.
Meanwhile, the median corporate credit rating has dropped to BBB- according to S&P Global. That’s just one notch above high yield, speculative-grade junk. Oaktree Capital (where Howard Marks is Co-Chair), told Bloomberg last week that it expects “a flood of troubled credits topping $1 trillion. The supply of low quality debt is significantly higher than prior periods, while the lack of covenant protections makes investing in shaky creditors riskier than ever. Those flows could mean debt will fall into distress quickly.”
The bottom line is that the combination of wildly experimental monetary policy and subdued growth in wages and salaries in the recovery from the global financial crisis has contributed to a dysfunctional equilibrium, with massive increases in debt burdens at the government, household, and corporate level. The quality of this debt has progressively weakened, both because of lighter covenants and underwriting standards, and because of a more general deterioration in credit ratings and servicing capacity.
Low household savings and growing consumer debt, born of depressed wage and salary compensation, have contributed to temporarily elevated profit margins that investors have treated as permanent. Corporations, enticed by low interest rates, have engaged in a massive leveraged buy-out of stocks, partly to offset dilution from stock grants to executives, and apparently in the misguided belief that valuations and subsequent market returns are unrelated. Equity valuations, on the most reliable measures, rival or exceed those observed at the 1929 and 2000 market extremes. By our estimates, stocks are likely to substantially underperform Treasury bond yields in the coming 10-12 years. Emphatically, valuation extremes cannot be “justified” by low interest rates, because when interest rates are low because growth rates are also low, no valuation premium is “justified” at all.
Amid these risks, I’ll emphasize again that our immediate, near-term outlook would become much more neutral (or even constructive with a strong safety net) if an improvement in market internals was to indicate fresh speculative psychology among investors. Still, further speculation would only make the completion of this cycle even worse.
The hallmark of an economic Ponzi scheme is that the operation of the economy relies on the constant creation of low-grade debt in order to finance consumption and income shortfalls among some members of the economy, using the massive surpluses earned by other members of the economy. The debt burdens, speculation, and skewed valuations most responsible for today’s lopsided prosperity are exactly the seeds from which the next crisis will spring.
- John P. Hussman, Ph.D.,
Hallmark of an Economic Ponzi Scheme, June 4, 2018
ContextConceived in Disgrace: The 350th Anniversary of the Creation of the Bank of SwedenHistory is Clear, Central Banks Fail to Assure Economic StabilityHow Business Owners Take Cues From Interest Rates - By Frank Shostak'..And it's not unusual for U.S. equities to go on their merry way right into trouble..''..I think a worldwide debt default is likely in the next 10–12 years.''..a decade-long debt .. emerging markets..' - '..a tech bubble larger than March of 2000..''..over time, debt stops stimulating growth..' - '..The mother of all bubbles exists and it is in the debt markets..'