The coronavirus shutdown is hammering supply and demand across the globe. That has forced the real economy into a sharp recession and triggered a rolling financial crisis. Below is a primer on one key piece of this mess: the crisis in corporate debt markets. This branch of finance is vitally important because even healthy companies often need access to credit. If they do not get it, they go under.
In 2008, the vector of crisis ran from mortgage-backed securities to the rest of the financial sector and then to the real economy. This time, the real economy is being hit directly, and the damage is reverberating back into financial markets. The failing markets, in feedback-loop fashion, further threaten the real economy as corporations find it harder to borrow. As the corporate debt markets sour, major companies will go bankrupt. Unemployment is skyrocketing. Some analysts expect the economy to contract by an annualized rate of 30 percent during the second quarter of 2020.
Already, US financial markets are on public life support. The Federal Reserve has committed to unlimited purchasesof all sorts of assets: US Treasuries, mortgage-backed securities, car loans, municipal debts, and, in a historic step, both short term and long-term corporate debt. But the crisis will require more than a financial rescue.
"Like a hypertrophied organ rupturing, the putrefaction of unsustainable corporate debt now threatens to create a generalized economic sepsis that will hurt even healthy firms."
The key political question now is: What sort of controls will come with the state intervention? Corporate greed and self-dealing need to be checked not merely in the name of fairness but also to make sure public bailout money is actually invested in the real economy rather than just gambled away, as it was after the 2008 crash and rescue.
The Rise of Corporate Debt
Since 2008, household debt levels have actually declined and are now lower than they were going into the last crash. But not corporate debt. Measured as a firm's "net debt" compared to its EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization), corporate debt has doubled since the last crash. In 2009, the average American company owed $2 of debt for every $1 in earnings. Today, the average firm carries net debt to EBITDA of 3 to 1, and many firms — like Ford Motor, CarMax, Harley-Davidson, and General Motors — carry ratios ranging from 8 to 1, to as high as 15 to 1. Boeing, a special case because of its 737 MAX crisis, carries a ratio of 37 to 1.
Over the last two decades, corporate America's credit rating has collapsed. In the early '90s, more than sixty companies held AAA credit ratings. Today, only two US firms are AAA rated: Johnson & Johnson and Microsoft. In 2001, fewer than one in five "investment-grade" firms were rated BBB. Today half of all investment-grade corporate debt belongs to firms rated "triple-B" (BBB) or lower. A third of those firms are rated triple-B minus (BBB-), one notch away from speculative or "junk" status.
Already many triple-B-rated corporate bonds are trading on secondary markets at unusually low prices and high yields, often above 5 percent; that means even "investment grade" bonds are being treated as junk. Soon many triple-B-rated corporations will be formally downgraded to junk. That will drive up their borrowing costs and restrict their access to credit. Even healthy companies often need access to ready credit. If they do not get it, they go under.
The rating agency Moody's estimates the default rate for "speculative-grade" debt — companies with ratings lower than Baa from Moody's Investors Service, or a rating lower than BBB from Standard & Poor's — might reach 10 percent this year, up from 2.3 percent last year. The consequences of all this will reverberate throughout the wider economy, deepening and extending the recession.
Total global corporate debt, including bonds and loans, is approximately $66 trillion; more than double what it was a decade ago. For comparison, the combined gross national product of all economies was estimated at $80.27 trillion in 2017. About a quarter of that is the US economy.
What They Did With the Money
After the 2008 crash, the world's central banks, with the US Federal Reserve in the lead, spent the next decade pushing money into the financial markets by way of super-low interest rates and the direct public purchase of financial assets from the private sector via quantitative easing (QE).
The cheap credit encouraged lots of corporate borrowing in the form of loans from banks and massive issuance of corporate bonds. Unlike loans, which can be routinely extended, or sometimes abruptly terminated, or have interest rates that float up and down, corporate bonds are debt instruments issued by a company committing to repay borrowed money on a specified schedule at a specified, usually fixed, rate of interest.
Corporations have been borrowing for a variety of reasons that range from shrewd arbitrage to stupid and reckless asset stripping. For a struggling and unprofitable company, for example JCPenney, debt can be a lifeline. For a profitable firm, borrowing money can be a way to raise capital without diluting existing shareholders' claim on the company's profits, which would happen if the firm issued stock.
Even some profitable firms with piles of cash borrowed rather than spend their cash, in part for the firepower effect: letting other competitors and market entrants know that the firm has enough money on hand to buy out any threatening start-ups, and showing the world the firm is ready to ride out any economic crisis.
Some firms used their borrowed money to buy other firms. This helped fuel a post-2008 wave of mergers and acquisitions (M&As). Deloitte reported"more than $10 trillion in [M&A] domestic transactions since 2013." Targeted companies borrowed to stockpile cash as a defense against such takeovers.
Firms also borrowed to fund CEO compensation, distributions to investors via dividends, and stock buybacks. Companies buy back their own stock so as to boost its price. A rising stock price is useful in many ways: it can keep away hostile raiders by making a targeted company too expensive to take over, but it can also draw in friendly suitors because (with some creative accounting) a rising stock value can make a weak firm appear more profitable. Corporate executives like a rising stock price because compensation packages are both tied to stock performance and almost always include some payment in company stock, so the higher the stock price, the higher the executives' payout.
Sometimes, firms even invested their borrowed money in actual production. The capital-intensive oil and gas industry did that, but as we explain below, it still faces a crisis, perhaps more salient than other sectors
Bad Credit as Perverse Incentive
The end result of all the borrowing was declining corporate credit-worthiness: corporate debt soon badly outpaced their earnings growth and cash balances. This led to widespread credit-rating downgrades.
Perversely, lower credit ratings did not slow the borrowing binge, but rather spurred on further lending and borrowing, because as corporate credit ratings slipped, the interest rate that the downgraded firms had to pay on their loans and bonds increased. And, thus, so too did the lenders' profits.
Corporate debt and stock prices entered into a twisted dialectic, each driving the other. As the stock market continued to inflate over the last decade, it provided the confidence investors required to continue their purchases of risky corporate bonds.
Keep in mind that many of the lending banks and asset funds were actually or essentially borrowing from Uncle Sam at inflation-adjusted rates close to zero, then lending to companies with triple-B and triple-B minus ratings at 5 percent interest. Profits like that meant there were always banks and asset funds eager to lend to debt-burdened corporations.
"Capitulation to the gluttony of financiers is deeply unjust. But it is also unworkable in purely technical terms. Without constraints on greed, there will be another bubble and crash and a longer slump, more suffering, greater inequality, and more social instability."
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