In recent days, the spread of Covid-19 and warnings from the World Health Organization, US CDC, and other health agencies have caused investors to reprice risk assets. Although global equity and sovereign debt markets reacted faster to the developments, corporate credit markets have now begun responding to an outbreak that seems increasingly likely to have […]

Despite their strong fundamental performance, CLOs continue to trade at wider spreads than similarly rated corporate bonds or securitised products, particularly in Europe. We believe that complexity, “guilt by association” to CDOs or their hybrid ABS/corporate nature may explain this persistent yield premium but regulatory and policy decisions are also relevant. In this note we […]

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 […]