Thursday, May 07, 2009
A brief note on the capital markets
I heard a couple of capital markets factoids this morning which point toward aggressively improving liquidity in the debt markets. In the original issuance "high yield" debt market, which caters to issuers who are not "investment grade," there were $10 billion in new deals done in all of the first quarter, another $10 billion in April, and $8 billion this week alone. That is a remarkable acceleration, and marks the first meaningful volume since the second quarter of last year.
In the market for convertible debt (bonds that can be converted into the common stock of the issuer, and therefore have some upside with the stock price), there were exactly no deals done in the fourth quarter of 2008, two in January, none again in February, seven in March and nine in April. Not only that, but the range of issuers able to bring transactions to market has widened significantly, and terms are improving.
All good. Let's all hope that this "window" stays open a long time.
1 Comments:
By 
, at
Thu May 07, 12:45:00 PM:
Another good factoid: Barclays paid $1.75B for Lehman assets in the fourth quarter of 2008 and reports it's IB earnings were up 500M pounds sterling in the first quarter in greater part due to the Lehman acquisition. That's a 40% or so return in one quarter.Nice deal.
