Tuesday, December 16, 2008

2009 - European Corporate Debt Nightmare

The current financial crises has been coming in waves. I have thought that the last wave will be corporate defaults on billions of poorly underwritten loans during the buyout and recapitlization boom. In the U.S. this starts to pick up next year but doesn't really start peaking until late 2010 into 2011. I am not sure what the distribution of debt coming due in Europe will be but as this article points out, 2009 is going to be a very cold year for corporations looking for refinancing in Europe. Thanks goes to Ron.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2008/12/2009_is_pay_back_year.html

What it shows is that next year, 2009, there will be a massive bulge in the value of bonds issued by European companies that have to be repaid.

Or, to put it another way, about $1000bn of "old world" companies' borrowings in the form of tradable debt has to be paid back during the next 12 months - with something like $800bn of this owed by financial companies and $200bn by non-financial companies.

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