Special thanx to P4P member @Ray Stasiezcko for alerting me about this last week. Sorry for the late posting, however it's been the last few days of the month for me in my day job.
Operating out of a Chicago suburb, in a low-slung, red-brick building wedged between a Hyatt and a Radisson, Clover Technologies is in the mundane business of recycling everything from inkjet cartridges to mobile phones.
But in the past week it abruptly -- and alarmingly -- caught the attention of Wall Street. Almost overnight, a $693 million loan Clover took to the market five years ago lost about a third of its value. The startling nosedive stung even sophisticated investors, people who deal in the arcane business of trading corporate loans.
Clover’s loan isn’t especially large by Wall Street standards, yet its stark and swift decline set off fresh alarm bells -- bells that regulators have been sounding for months. It immediately became a real life example of the perils of investing these days in the $1.3 trillion market for leveraged loans, where a global chase for yield has allowed an explosion in borrowing and lax underwriting. In a market where trading can be thin -- and at a time when illiquidity is suddenly becoming a prominent concern in credit circles -- the episode shows how loans to highly leveraged companies can quickly implode when fortunes change. read the rest here