The steady drumbeat of warnings over the surge in risky corporate borrowing is growing louder and louder as regulators in the U.S. and Europe point to the hazards of businesses taking on too much debt, Bloomberg News reported. At issue is the $1.3 trillion leveraged lending market, composed of high-yield loans from firms with some of the weakest finances. While Federal Reserve and European Central Bank officials have drawn attention to these heavily indebted companies and the deteriorating standards of loans bundled into securities called CLOs, most regulators are careful to say a repeat of 2008 is unlikely because investors, rather than the banks they oversee, hold most of the debt. Yet that’s created a new, and potentially more dangerous, kind of risk. Precisely because roughly 85 percent of leveraged loans are held by non-banks, regulators are largely in the dark when it comes to pinpointing where the risks lie and how they’ll ripple through the financial system when the economy turns. More and more, critics are questioning whether regulators like the Fed have a handle on the problem or the right tools to contain the fallout. A big worry is highly indebted businesses employing thousands could face severe financial stress and, in some cases, insolvency, deepening the next downturn. “I always remind myself that even the smartest policy maker with the most far-reaching perspective, data and tools was basically blind-sided by the breadth and depth of the housing crisis,” said Mark Spindel, chief investment officer at Potomac River Capital. “Leveraged loans and corporate debt are not housing, but maybe it’s more pervasive than we think. We can’t take any of the CLO, leveraged loan, or private debt growth for granted.”
