Credit funds eye openings as more banks cut Asia lending
The number of lenders reducing their Asian exposure is seen to be growing fast amid the coronavirus crisis, leaving asset managers keen to fill the financing gap.
Seeking help: Businesses need financial support amid the Covid-19 crisis
As more European banks – and increasingly also regional ones – further pull back from lending to clients in Asia amid the Covid-19 fallout, private credit managers are ramping up efforts to raise money to provide companies with financing and thereby tap the growing appetite among yield-hungry asset owners.
A growing number of lenders are believed to be reducing or at least re-assessing their Asian exposure, after moves by Dutch firms ABN Amro and ING and Australia’s Westpac to retrench in the region last year. Sources said on condition of anonymity that the likes of Germany’s Commerzbank, Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) and Singapore’s UOB were among those paring their activit
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The chief executive and founder of DoubleLine suggested looking at a beaten-up and unloved sector of credit markets: bank loans. Alex Flynn/Bloomberg
Risks lurk in an overvalued stock market and the bond market with inflation on the horizon, DoubleLine chief executive and founder Jeffrey Gundlach said. But the fund manager dubbed by
Barron’s as the Bond King nearly a decade ago does have one pick for income investors.
In an interview with CNBC, Gundlach suggested looking at a beaten-up and unloved sector of credit markets: bank loans, which ended 2020 with price losses in many cases as fund investors fled the sector. By contrast, fund investors rushed into other parts of the credit market, especially junk bonds, in their quest to grab what little income was available after the Federal Reserve slashed short-term interest rates to zero and provided unprecedented support to the corporate bond market.
Daniel Acker/Bloomberg
Visa and Plaid have called off their merger because of federal antitrust opposition to the deal.
The companies struck an agreement to merge a year ago, with Visa (ticker: V) agreeing to pay $5.3 billion for the payments-technology company. Plaid verifies and links accounts on apps like
PayPal Holdings ’ (PYPL) Venmo service with a user’s bank account. Visa and
Mastercard (MA) had both invested in Plaid, which began in 2012.
But in November, the Justice Department sued to block the merger, arguing that Visa was a monopolist in online debit controlling 70% of transactions and that Plaid aimed to challenge Visa’s dominance.
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Debt levels on dairy farms have remained remarkably stable, indicating a significant amount of expenditure has been done through savings and cash flow.
According to the most recent Teagasc National Farm Survey results, 64% of dairy farms in Ireland had an average debt of just over €110,000 in 2019. This means that over one-third of dairy farmers in Ireland have no debt at all.
So what of the ones who do? Is €110,000 a high level of borrowings? In financial speak, there are two ways of looking at this – the first is to look at leveraging and the second is looking at the debt to asset ratio.