NEW YORK (Reuters) - Scores of companies are being punished in the bond market as the Obama administration's policies on General Motors and Chrysler LLC create new risks for creditors, a veteran bond strategist says.
As GM teeters toward a bankruptcy filing and Chrysler attempts to restructure in bankruptcy court, the Obama administration is offering most of the recovery value of those companies to "a favored political class, in this case the United Auto Workers, leaving creditors with very slender debt recoveries," Christopher Garman, founder of Garman Research in Orinda, California, said in a report released late on Friday.
To gauge whether those cases have made debtholders wary of other companies with so-called favored political classes, Garman compared spreads, or bonds' extra yields over U.S. Treasury yields, for companies with collective bargaining agreements with the high-yield bond market as a whole. While the two performed in line with each other since 2003, they diverged sharply in February, with spreads on companies with organized labor gapping nearly 11 percentage points higher than the market as a whole, according to Garman's research. The gap in spreads has persisted and was about 9 percentage points as of mid-May, Garman said. The gap appeared shortly after strategists reported signs that bondholder negotiations with GM were unraveling.
Apart from automakers, sectors heavily influenced by collective bargaining agreements include supermarkets, construction, wired telecommunications, delivery and healthcare, Garman found. Gaming, select media and publishing companies and paper and textile companies also made his list. For years in the past, "bondholders were more than happy to hold on to the debt of these companies," Garman said in an interview. "That's come to a pretty sharp end over the past six months."
Garman's findings echo warnings from other bondholders that unionized companies will have trouble attracting cash in the bond market if the bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler give creditors substantially smaller payouts than they traditionally received.
As GM teeters toward a bankruptcy filing and Chrysler attempts to restructure in bankruptcy court, the Obama administration is offering most of the recovery value of those companies to "a favored political class, in this case the United Auto Workers, leaving creditors with very slender debt recoveries," Christopher Garman, founder of Garman Research in Orinda, California, said in a report released late on Friday.
To gauge whether those cases have made debtholders wary of other companies with so-called favored political classes, Garman compared spreads, or bonds' extra yields over U.S. Treasury yields, for companies with collective bargaining agreements with the high-yield bond market as a whole. While the two performed in line with each other since 2003, they diverged sharply in February, with spreads on companies with organized labor gapping nearly 11 percentage points higher than the market as a whole, according to Garman's research. The gap in spreads has persisted and was about 9 percentage points as of mid-May, Garman said. The gap appeared shortly after strategists reported signs that bondholder negotiations with GM were unraveling.
Apart from automakers, sectors heavily influenced by collective bargaining agreements include supermarkets, construction, wired telecommunications, delivery and healthcare, Garman found. Gaming, select media and publishing companies and paper and textile companies also made his list. For years in the past, "bondholders were more than happy to hold on to the debt of these companies," Garman said in an interview. "That's come to a pretty sharp end over the past six months."
Garman's findings echo warnings from other bondholders that unionized companies will have trouble attracting cash in the bond market if the bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler give creditors substantially smaller payouts than they traditionally received.
HT: Mike LaFaive
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