CLOs have received positive attention in the press1 of late following the release of the Bank of England’s latest Financial Stability Report2 in July. As highlighted in the Bank of England’s report, current CLO structures (“CLO 2.0”, issued from 2011 onwards) are much more robust compared to pre-crisis structures (“CLO 1.0”, issued before 2009). As […]

THE VALUE OF INTEREST RATE FLOORS IN EUROPEAN CLOs While we typically think of CLO debt as a floating-rate investment paying a margin over Euribor, since 2015 most European CLOs have included a Euribor floor set at zero. They have thus effectively paid fixed rates of interest since 2015 when 3m Euribor dropped into negative […]

All CLO managers produce lengthy pitch books presenting the firm’s skill sets and geographic spread, outlining their investment philosophy, and listing the names of their key personnel from chief investment officers down to analysts and traders. Some, such as Barings, BlackRock and Oaktree, like to include the biographies of some key professionals. In these documents […]

WHAT IS HAPPENING WITH AAA CLOs? In this Reflections we explore the reliance of the CLO market on Japanese investors, the underperformance of CLO AAAs compared to other credit products during 2019 year-to-date and recent moves towards a more granular and diverse AAA investor base. CLO MARKET RELIANCE ON JAPANESE BANKS We have often highlighted […]