A trader works on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, U.S., April 8, 2025. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid/File Photo
NEW YORK: Credit investors are looking to pounce on new opportunities resulting from the wild swings in financial markets triggered by the US-China trade war.
Average spreads in the US high-yield bond market are about 419 basis points – lingering around the highest since late 2023 – while prices in the leveraged-loan market have dipped to below 95 US cents on the US dollar since President Donald Trump’s announcement last week that the US was raising the tariffs on Chinese goods to 145%.
Speculative-grade companies with exposure to tariff-related costs – especially in the retail and energy sectors – have already traded down meaningfully and more pain could be on the way.
That’s left some money managers looking to selectively add risk to portfolios.
TCW Group Inc has been adding high yield and bank-loan exposure to every single portfolio that invests in those asset classes, according to Brian Gelfand, co-head of global credit and head of credit trading at the firm.
“The market is running from credits with tariff-related risk,” he said. “There are going to be survivors in that cohort and we want to identify those and invest in them at improved prices.”
BlackRock’s chief executive officer Larry Fink warned last Monday that most chief executives he talked to think the United States is already in a recession while consumer sentiment plunged to the second-weakest reading on record.
Airlines, food and drug stores and supermarkets have all seen falling sales in recent weeks, according to alternative data compiled by Bloomberg.
Higher incidences of distress and increased demand for financing from struggling companies means “we’re likely to invest our latest opportunistic debt fund faster than otherwise would have been the case,” Oaktree Capital Management co-founder Howard Marks wrote in a memo last Wednesday. — Bloomberg
