Junk-Bond Turmoil just Preliminary, “The Real Panic Will Come With…”

Suddenly there’s a laundry list of what went wrong. A “more hawkish Fed stance, heightened geopolitical risks,” Argentina’s default, another bank collapse and panicky bailout in Europe (Banco Espirito Santo), “and concerns over stretched valuations,” wrote Matthew Mish, Head of Credit Strategy at UBS Investment Bank, and Thibault Colle, Associate Credit Strategist; it triggered “a cascade of mutual fund outflows in recent weeks.”

They weren’t exaggerating. Investors yanked $7.1 billion out of junk bond funds in the week ending Wednesday, a record amount, according to Lipper. This has been going on since early July, and junk bond prices have dropped, yields have jumped from all-time lows, and yield spreads have suddenly widened. After having been inflated to dizzying proportions, the junk-bond bubble has been pricked. And the hot air is hissing out of it.

A chart by UBS is a picture of investors suddenly bailing out while they still can. The vicious taper tantrum of last summer looks comparatively tame. Neither glorious economic fundamentals nor corporate financial engineering caused investors to pile helter-skelter, eyes-closed into this high-yield junk. The Fed’s financial repression did.

The Fed has made it impossible for yield investors to earn a noticeable return above the rate of inflation with low-risk paper. So they chased after whatever yield they could get and they held their noses and ventured deeper and deeper into a swamp they normally wouldn’t want to be in. They did that in unison. The demand they created for junk drove up valuations and repressed yields further into low-yield purgatory, where potential losses are huge and potential gains very meager. Exactly as the Fed had wanted them to.

But the Fed has changed its mind. And it’s communicating it on a near daily basis [read… Fed’s Fisher: End of ZIRP moved ‘further forward’]. The force that has driven up the junk bond market and that has allowed overleveraged corporations to sell a mountain of junk bonds at record low cost is in the process of disappearing: QE will be tapered out of existence this fall; ZIRP will be whittled down later. Instead of the Fed’s free money flowing into the high-yield market, money is now draining out of it.

UBS warns that investors “no longer have the Fed at their back,” just when “corporate leverage has bottomed as profits move sideways while net debt rises.” As spooked investors – many of them conservative yield investors driven into junk bonds by the Fed’s relentless financial repression – are trying to dump their holdings before everyone else does, the problem of market liquidity arises: it has been evaporating.

Junk bond assets in mutual funds and ETFs have nearly tripled since the bottom of the financial crisis, while inventories at dealers have collapsed as many of the big banks have largely withdrawn from the fray. Market makers packed up their marbles and went home, while companies sold dizzying amounts of new junk debt at record high prices to investors blinded by the Fed’s financial repression.

So when these spooked investors are trying to sell, who is going to buy? Yields are still near historic lows, after nearly six years of QE and ZIRP that are now drawing to an end. But higher yields and lower prices – and higher default rates, according to Fitch – are lined up into the horizon as far as the eye can see. There are not going to be a lot of eager buyers.

“Simply put, one cannot enter and exit positions freely,” the authors explained with razor-sharp calm. Instead, investors are stuck and become “more buy-and-hold in nature.” In doing so, they could get hosed.

This arguably creates a prisoner’s dilemma. Investors have a choice. If they do not sell, and others do not sell, then market stability will likely result and historically low valuations could persist for a while longer. However, given challenging liquidity conditions and warnings from the Fed and others of a market ‘bubble,’ investors cannot overstay their welcome. If some of them decide to sell, then they can hope to exit before others – but risk causing a stampede of outflows.

And that stampede has already started. UBS sees “few signs of stabilization.” Instead, “headline risk will persist around the Fed’s stance as it finishes tapering and has to outline its exit strategy….” Eurozone banks are facing the ECB’s stress tests, and results will likely be out in October or November. And the asset allocation strategists at UBS “are tactically calling for a bout of risk-off.”

But the current turmoil in the junk bond market is just some preliminary pushing and shoving:

The real panic will come with a more severe downturn in credit and economic fundamentals, which will likely trigger an exodus from non-institutional and crossover/tourists from US high yield. That moment is unlikely to be a 2014 event….

OK, so maybe not this year. Unless everybody is afraid to wait till next year and starts selling now to be among the first ones out. Because everyone knows that in bond funds, the first ones out win.

When redemptions start as prices fall, funds dip into cash and sell the most liquid bonds that have lost the least value, and the first batch of investors get out scot-free. As redemptions continue, the less liquid bonds have to be sold into an illiquid market, and prices plunge. Junk-bond funds that get hit by massive redemptions over a long period of time can punish the late sellers and the forced “buy-and-hold” investors brutally. That’s the effect of the “prisoner dilemma.”

And since everyone knows this, investors might be trying to get out early, thus triggering the very event – the “stampede of outflows” – that will punish investors behind them the most.

When Ben Hunt, Chief Risk Officer of Salient Partners, spent a few weeks traveling across the country and meeting with clients – investment advisors and professional investors – to understand their thinking about the markets, he found that a fascinating phenomenon had become near universal among these professionals, a phenomenon with a potentially dreadful outcome. Read…. ‘Faith’ in Markets Collapses Among Professional Investors

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  9 comments for “Junk-Bond Turmoil just Preliminary, “The Real Panic Will Come With…”

  1. VegasBob says:

    Great article!

    Yes, liquidity in the junk bond market has more or less dried up, and prices are plummeting.

    I have one 10K junk bond left in my portfolio.

    It was at 83 in the beginning of May, when I should have sold it; now it’s down to 51, and trying to catch a bid for it is harder than pulling hens’ teeth.

    I tried to sell it on Tuesday. My broker put out a ‘bid-wanted’ request that came back ‘no response,’ meaning not one dealer in the country was willing to buy it.

    My thought is that what’s coming down the financial pike is going to be much worse than 2008.

    • Wolf Richter says:

      I featured your comment on the front page, right column. You describe what will be a more and more common situation for junk bond holders. I wish you the best of luck.

  2. Archy Don says:

    “My thought is that what’s coming down the financial pike is going to be much worse than 2008.”

    VegasBob, you’re thinking what a whole lot of us are thinking.

    • Wolf Richter says:

      This is what a lot of people I talk to are fretting about: the thing that has been created has become bigger than any bubble prior to it, and in many of its aspects and distortions will remain unknown, at least officially, until afterwards. They’re fretting that we’re in completely uncharted waters. This time, it isn’t just a tech bubble as in 1999, or credit and housing bubble, as in 2007. This time, it’s broader and deeper and more varied and more complex.

  3. Tim says:

    In Europe they have introduced negative interest rates for the first time (yes they are paying the big, big banks to take out a loan at 0.1% interest). So now a bank that borrows say $100 trillion dollars can get $100 billion in profits every single year for doing nothing except sitting on the cash. That will definitely solve all our economic woes for sure!

    • Frank (Belgium) says:

      no, the banks have to PAY 0,1 % interest on the money they deposit in the ECB, and that’s to encourage them give more credit to European enterprises

  4. Matt R. says:

    Don’t worry: the stock market is back up today.

    • MattC says:

      Exactly. It’s interesting. When I listen to any major radio station at the top of the hour they always end the news with what the Dow did. We have been conditioned as a society to gauge the health of everything according to the Dow index.

      I have never personally bought a bond but I understand market liquidity and fear quite clearly.

  5. Tom says:

    where is the money going?

Comments are closed.