Cloud 9fin

Will Thames Water’s overflowing £14bn debt pile lead to its downfall? Or should everyone pipe down?

Bianca Boorer sits down with Owen Sanderson to discuss the media storm around Thames Water over the last two weeks, dispelling misguided views on its liquidity while going through potential obstacles down the stream.

The infamous J.Crew maneuver was a bombshell, setting a blueprint for contentious liability management deals and sparking a wave of efforts to block such maneuvers. Now, some direct lenders are worried they've found a way around those blockers.

As we wrote earlier this week, securitization baskets in some credit agreements could be loose enough to allow borrowers to securitize assets like intellectual property.

How realistic is this idea, and what can people do about it? Will Caiger-Smith quizzes covenant expert James Wallick to get the answers. 

Thanks to rising scrutiny from investors, ESG is no longer just a second thought in private credit dealmaking. It’s now a must-have.

Private funds are using a variety of methods to integrate ESG considerations into their decision-making: for this week’s episode, our host Sammy Cole sat down with Cassandra Fahy, a managing director at Pemberton Asset Management, to discuss some of them.

How has the approach to ESG evolved over time? What challenges come up when collecting data from borrowers? And what does the future holds for ESG in private credit?

The end of Libor is a little over a week away, and some US corporate borrowers are still racing to switch their floating rate loans to SOFR ahead of the 30 June deadline.

The loan market’s transition away from the old reference rate has been slow, but increasingly contentious in recent months. Borrowers, lenders and financial sponsors have tussled over the compensation offered to loan investors to swap into the lower-yielding SOFR benchmark.

In this week’s edition of Cloud 9fin, US deputy editor David Bell sat down with Dan Ko, a senior principal and portfolio manager at Eagle Point Credit Management to talk about how CLO equity investors rallied loan buyers to resist off-market SOFR amendments — as well as the challenges and opportunities in CLO equity as more deals exit their reinvestment periods.

Samhallsbyggnadsbolaget (SBB) has had a tough couple of months, after losing its investment grade rating and with some bondholders now arguing the company has breached a key covenant under its bond documentation.

For this week’s episode of Cloud9fin, Bianca Boorer sits down with Hazik Siddiqui and David Orbay-Graves to look into the Swedish real estate firm’s recent accounting revisions, ways it can address its bloated capital structure and thoughts on recoveries.

Private credit is attracting plenty of new faces these days, but as we wrote in this week’s Unicrunch newsletter, a handful of household names dominate fundraising and dealmaking.

Craig Packer is one of those names. Owl Rock, the direct lending firm he co-founded back in 2016, was already a power player in direct lending before it merged with Dyal Capital in 2021 to create Blue Owl; he’s now at the helm of one of private credit’s biggest brands, as investor interest in the sector is going mainstream.

For this week’s episode of the podcast, our private credit editor David Brooke sat down with Craig to talk about deals, documentation, retail investors and the threat of a recession — and Blue Owl’s efforts to dictate terms and keep lending standards tight.

Why is Pizza Express getting into the music business? Well, these plans have been in the works for a while, and they actually make more sense than you might think.

That doesn’t mean this venture is without risk — especially as the company’s margins are deteriorating, and it’s had some troublesome relations with hourly workers over the past few months.

So how does PX Records, the group’s new jazz-focused music imprint, fit into the broader business plan? For this week’s episode of the podcast, host Sammy Cole sits down with US managing editor Will Caiger-Smith to get the download.

9fin’s distressed reporter Bianca Boorer travels to Milan to sit down with Bruno Cova, Partner and European co-chair of restructuring and insolvency at law firm Greenberg Traurig.

Cova takes us through his illustrious career so far, from working for the Italian government, on Parmalat, Europe’s largest fraud case, to moving into private practice and working on big restructuring cases such Moby and Maccaferri.

He gives his insights into the benefits and drawbacks of the recent reform in the Italian bankruptcy law as well as what to look out for in distress going forward.

Ever pulled an all-nighter to prepare a pitch, or had your weekend ruined by a last-minute fire drill from your MD? Imagine if artificial intelligence could crunch the numbers and format the slidedeck for you. What would you do with the extra free time?

But also, what valuable, formative experiences might you miss out on if you could outsource rote tasks to technology? And how might that change the culture of your institution?

Everyone’s talking about AI, and how it could revolutionize basically everything. We wanted to figure out what it might mean — both good and bad — for the debt markets, so 9fin reporters William Hoffman and Shubham Saharan hit the phones for some philosophical conversations.

In this week’s episode of the podcast, we’re asking: is AI coming for your finance job?

Announcing a refinancing on the day your debt matures is an unusual move — and indeed, Lycra’s refinancing stretched some boundaries. But it’s also a great example of how not all drop-down transactions are the same.

For this week’s episode of Cloud 9fin, Bianca Boorer sat down with Brian Dearing to discuss Lycra’s last minute refi of its 2023 notes. The company’s innovative variation on the infamous drop-down mechanism provides food for thought on flexible liability management techniques.