Corporate bonds: Emerging bubble
by Jonathan Wheatley
Published: on February 16, 2015 in the Financial Times. Page 9.
Signs of distress are appearing in companies’ debt
In February 2010, a medium-sized Brazilian bank called Banco Pine set out to raise $125m from international investors. Its timing was perfect: Brazil’s economy was booming and foreign money was pouring into Brazil and other emerging markets.
Banco Pine’s offering was a success. As recently as late November, its bonds were trading at $1.06 on the dollar — investors were so confident the bank would keep making generous interest payments on its debt that they were willing to pay much more for the bond than they would get back on its due date in January 2017.
Today, however, investors’ love affair with Brazil has cooled — and Banco Pine has felt the shift. By the end of last month, it was trading at 94 cents on the dollar. At that price, with less than two years to maturity, it was offering total annual interest of 12.2 per cent, a premium of 1,100 basis points over comparable US Treasury bonds — a sure sign, analysts say, of a bond in distress.
Banco Pine’s problems include loans it made to companies that have been caught up in an alleged $20bn corruption scandal at Petrobras, Brazil’s government-controlled oil company — though the bonds of companies implicated in the scandal have fared far worse than Pine’s. But the recent sharp and sudden movements in Pine’s bond price — which has since partially recovered — also underline what many fear is inherent instability in one of emerging markets’ biggest and youngest asset classes.
A decade ago, the market for EM hard currency corporate bonds hardly existed. Today, it is bigger than the US high-yield corporate bond market, an asset class familiar to investors for decades, and more than four times the size of Europe’s high-yield bond market.
What has driven such extraordinary growth? In just a few years before the global financial crisis of 2008-09, emerging markets won over the world’s investors. In 2001, Goldman Sachs identified the Bric economies — Brazil, Russia, India and China — as the new engines of global growth. Chinese demand drove a commodity boom that helped billions of people rise out of poverty and into the consuming classes.
After the crisis, the developed world’s expansionary monetary policies kept the party going, pushing cheap credit to EM consumers and sending ever more foreign money into EM assets. Emerging companies, many able to tap overseas markets for the first time, embarked on a borrowing spree. Yield-hungry foreign investors were happy to help.
David Spegel, global head of EM sovereign and corporate bond strategy at BNP Paribas, has been following hard currency EM corporate bonds since 1994. His figures show that the value of such bonds in the market has grown from $107bn then to more than $2tn today.
But with Brazil’s economy imploding, China slowing and dark shadows over markets from Venezuela to Russia and Ukraine, some analysts worry that the party has gone on too long.
Stuart Oakley, global head of EM foreign exchange trading at Nomura in London, points to how easily things could go wrong. “It is entirely possible that we could see a default by a big, emerging market commodity exporting corporate,” he says.
“In that scenario you would get people redeeming money from big EM asset managers, bids for the bonds from banks would dry up, there would be sharp price drops on those and all associated assets and a sell-off across this or another asset class.”
Fears of a rout
One source of danger is that the EM corporate bond market, pumped up by years of often indiscriminate buying, is still being engorged by a search for yield among global investors. It is also showing alarming signs of distress at a time when the ability of the financial system to handle trades between buyers and sellers is much reduced, increasing the risk that any sudden exit could quickly turn into a disorderly rout.
Part of the problem stems from the bond-buying schemes launched by the US Federal Reserve and other central banks to revive growth after the financial crisis. The aim of these “quantitative easing” programmes is to lower borrowing costs across the bond markets, especially for corporate issuers. As yields have fallen in one asset class, such as investment grade US corporate bonds, they have dragged down yields across other classes, such as US high-yield and EM corporates.
For investors in search of yield, this has been traumatic. As noted recently by Zoltan Pozsar, a former senior adviser at the US Treasury, while the yield on the benchmark US Treasury bond has fallen from 6 per cent in 2000 to less than 2 per cent today, the returns sought by many US public pension funds have barely changed at about 8 per cent. Other big institutional investors also have imperatives that are hard to satisfy by investing in what are usually seen as safe assets.
The result is known as “forced buying” — asset managers buying assets outside their usual area of expertise because they have to put their clients’ cash to work somewhere.
“If I give my money to an asset manager, German Bunds and US Treasuries don’t cut it,” says Mr Oakley at Nomura. “From retail investors to big institutions, people have been pushed further down the curve into riskier assets.”
This has led to a process that Sergio Trigo Paz, head of EM debt at BlackRock, calls “shut your eyes and buy”. Many crossover investors, who are new and often far from committed to emerging markets, have driven up the price of some bonds even as risks have become more apparent.
This, says Kathleen Middlemiss, head of Emea and Latin American credit research at UBS, has been going on for years. “The question is, how long can you sit on the sidelines of a rally, even if you don’t think it makes sense?” she says. “Investors have become way too complacent.”
Surge in downgrades
Only in the past few months have they become more cautious — and with good reason. Mr Spegel at BNP Paribas points to a deterioration in credit quality, illustrated by a recent sharp increase in the number of bonds being downgraded by the three big rating agencies.
In the last quarter of 2014, he notes, there were 111 more downgrades than upgrades for EM corporate bonds, up from 26 in the third. This year, there were a net 56 downgrades in January alone.
“If you look at the history of investment flows to EM, it very closely tracks the credit cycle,” he says. As the rate of downgrades increases, “borrowers can’t raise money in the bond markets, which further exacerbates the default cycle, which leads to more downgrades, and you’re in a negative feedback loop.”
Adding to the danger is the recent steep fall in global oil prices since last summer. More than 30 per cent of EM hard currency bonds have been issued by energy related sovereigns and corporates and the banks that are exposed to them. According to one industry estimate, every $10 fall in the price of oil leads to lost earnings in the EM corporate bond universe of $25bn a year.
Does this presage a wave of defaults? Few analysts expect that. Mr Spegel sees the value of EM corporate defaults rising to $15bn this year, up from $12bn last year.
Even in Venezuela and Ukraine, two countries where sovereign defaults are largely priced in, investors expect some form of restructuring rather than outright default. Some Ukrainian corporates, all of which could be expected to restructure in the wake of the sovereign, are already negotiating exchanges, extensions or other restructuring with their bondholders.
Flight to quality
The greater danger is that investors start to leave the asset class altogether. That could be triggered by a default, but also by a much lesser event. If a bond falls sharply in price, any investor who has borrowed money to buy it — as hedge funds habitually do — will have to sell others to make up the loss. Such waves of selling can spread quickly, not only to other bonds but also to other asset classes.
The likelihood of this is greater because of changed conditions on secondary markets, where bonds are traded, as opposed to on primary markets, where they are issued.
Quantitative easing has pumped up the primary markets but, since the financial crisis, regulatory and other changes have caused a drought of liquidity on secondary markets. Investment banks that used to hold large inventories of bonds on their books can no longer do so. Analysts at UBS say the volume of assets held by banks is half the level of five years ago, while the volume of assets held by investors is four times what it was.
“When there are bouts of buying there are no sellers and when there are bouts of selling there are no buyers,” says Mr Spegel. “It creates the perfect environment for distressed markets to get worse. This is the year of negative feedback loops.”
Despite that gloomy assessment, Mr Spegel does not see a catastrophic event on the horizon. One reason is the sustained appetite for yield among investors, which helps emerging market corporates to issue new debt to replace old. He expects about $500bn in EM corporate hard currency bonds to be issued this year, down from $572bn last year but still a large amount.
Siddharth Dahiya, head of EM corporate debt at Aberdeen, a specialist EM asset manager, concedes that, at first sight, the size and speed of growth of the asset class offer legitimate causes for concern.
But Mr Dahiya notes that hard currency corporate bonds are equal to only about 8 or 9 per cent of gross domestic product in Latin America and less than 3 per cent of GDP in Asia. Relatively few EM companies issue hard currency bonds, but those that do tend to be among the best-managed companies in their markets.
“Last year,” he says, “everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. China slowed down, commodity prices fell, we had QE tapering, the Ukraine crisis, Brazil blowing up — and the return on EM corporate bonds was 5 per cent. It is a very well diversified market.”
Nevertheless, others worry that the growth of the EM corporate asset class is a clear example of a bubble, one that is being blown up by the apparently unending tide of QE.
“The point of QE is to inflate the real economy,” says Mr Oakley at Nomura. “But instead of driving growth it is creating asset bubbles. The danger is that it will drive bubbles until they burst.”
***
Retail investors face the stress test
Who buys emerging market hard currency corporate bonds? It is not an easy question to answer but it is one worth asking.
At one end of the scale are sovereign wealth funds, the ocean liners of the investment world. They take a long view and keep a steady course. At the other end are retail investors. Sometimes described as sheep, they may be better thought of as spring lambs: skittish and quick to take flight.
Other groups in the asset class include institutional investors — pension funds, insurance companies, corporations and banks — hedge funds and family offices. How these investors handle episodes of market stress will determine the stability of this young asset class.
David Spegel, head of EM bond strategy at BNP Paribas, says retail investors — watchers of CNBC or Japanese housewives, say — form the bulk of EM corporate bondholders, at about 30 per cent. They typically invest in EM bonds through mutual funds and exchange traded funds.
Hung Tran, managing director of the Institute of International Finance, says mutual funds are used roughly equally by retail and institutional investors, while ETFs, which predominantly appeal to retail investors, have also attracted a growing following from institutions because they offer plenty of liquidity — the ability to quickly and easily find buyers and sellers.
Mr Tran says institutional investors comprise the biggest of the EM investor classes, owning more than half the assets. He is working on an initiative between the IIF and the World Bank to develop better sources of information.
Stuart Oakley, head of EM foreign exchange trading at Nomura in London, says that retail investors are not the only ones likely to sell when they detect trouble. “The problems would come as redemptions creep along the spectrum,” he says. “There comes a point where you might not have a systemic problem for the SWF, but it would be a systemic problem for the issuer and the issuing country. And then you get contagion.”
_________