Saturday, September 5th, 2026
Moody's puts expected ultimate recoveries on first-lien middle-market loans at about 68 cents, against a long-run average in the high seventies. Between 90 and 95 percent of broadly syndicated issuance now carries no financial maintenance covenant. Those two facts are the same fact.
Credit secondaries volume went from about $6bn in 2023 to roughly $11bn in 2024 and is expected to top $18bn for 2025. Quality stakes change hands at 95 to 99 percent of net asset value. That is either evidence the marks are right, or evidence that only the defensible ones get offered.
Hyperscalers and related issuers have sold about $225bn of bonds this year by S&P Global's count, on pace for a record. Capital spending now runs at roughly 94 percent of operating cash flow against 40 percent in 2023, and the paper being issued is long — matched to a useful life the issuers estimate themselves.
One account of second-quarter results says conditions have begun to stabilise. Another, from a review of filings by 44 business development companies, says portfolios moved further below cost. Ares Capital's non-accruals rose 15 percent to $708m. The reports do not contradict each other; they describe different derivatives of the same line.
The ten-year Treasury reached its highest yield since November 2023 on Wednesday. On the same day Japanese ten-year debt passed 3 percent for the first time in thirty years, German yields hit a fourteen-year high and British yields an eighteen-year one. Four governments with four different problems do not usually move together.
A head of state posted an AI-generated video of explosions at the world's most important oil export terminal. There was no other evidence of an attack. For anyone pricing oil, the question is no longer whether it happened but what it costs to find out.
The chair of the Financial Stability Board has written to the G20 about artificial intelligence. Half the letter describes a familiar credit event wearing new clothes. The other half describes something the system has not priced at all.
Around forty lenders funded one Sydney developer, and each carried its own view of what the loans were worth. An insolvency does not create the loss. It supplies the first price anyone is obliged to accept.
Capital markets have become the reinsurer of last resort for storm and quake risk, and the spread on a cat bond is now a cleaner read on climate exposure than anything in an insurer's filings.
Closed-end funds routinely trade below net asset value and mostly stay there. The persistence is the interesting part, because arbitrage cannot close a gap with no mechanism to force it.
Credit ratings lag the market by design, which would be harmless if so many mandates were not written to act on them. The lag is priced in; the forced selling is not.
An addition to a major index obliges a large and predictable set of buyers to act on a known date. That predictability is the whole opportunity, and the whole problem.
Shareholder meetings were a scheduling exercise for decades. Rising opposition on pay, board composition and auditor tenure has made the outcome uncertain enough to require actual campaigning.
Corporate bond ETFs now supply much of the liquidity that dealer balance sheets used to. The mechanism works well and has been tested mainly in conditions that were not the hard case.
Vehicles offering private-market exposure with periodic liquidity have gathered enormous sums from investors who have never needed to leave. The gate is the product, and most holders have not read it.
Private funds promised distributions on a timetable that stopped being met. The secondary market has grown from a distressed corner into the mechanism by which investors get money back at all.
A large stock of corporate debt issued at generational lows is coming due into a market priced very differently. The refinancing is available; what has changed is what it costs and who it is available to.
Sell-side coverage of companies below a billion dollars has thinned to almost nothing. The consequence is not merely obscurity — it is a measurable discount that persists regardless of what the business does.
Lending out the shares a fund holds has offset fees for years and rarely appears in the conversation about cost. As balances grow, the question of who keeps the proceeds is getting harder to leave unasked.
Fund launches have been outpaced by closures for the first sustained stretch in the product's history. The survivors reveal what the proliferation was actually for.
The asset class that ate corporate lending is maturing. What it built while growing is now permanent market structure.
Share repurchases are running at a substantial pace again, and the companies doing them have learned to explain themselves. Disclosure has improved faster than the underlying discipline.
The sleepiest corner of American finance is being dragged into the present by electronic trading, better disclosure and a generation of buyers who expect both.
Broad market index funds have become substantially less diversified than the word index implies. Institutional allocators are reworking mandates written when the assumption held.
The meme-stock cohort did not disappear when the fever broke. It aged into the most financially engaged retail generation in decades, with the account balances to show it.
Futures markets have spent the summer walking back easing expectations, and portfolio managers are adjusting duration, credit and cash accordingly.
After a long drought, public listings are returning in cautious single file. The companies going first are teaching everyone else the new rules.
After a decade in which payouts read as an admission of exhausted ambition, companies and investors have rediscovered the discipline of cash returned.