Archive for the ‘income’ Category
When a credit calls for assistance
Wednesday, March 24, 2010 20:03 Comments OffThe independent system of doing business no longer works. Today the workplace rallying cry is teamwork. Organizations are becoming interdependent and relying on others to help them accomplish their goals. They’re moving toward more openness and creating organizational cultures that support it. The Partnership Continuum model helps partners assess where they are in this transition. [...]
Small changes in credit quality
Saturday, December 5, 2009 16:45 Comments OffMean–variance analysis, made popular by Markowitz and Sharpe, has been the basis for the process of portfolio optimization since the 1990s. Yet, the method itself suffers from various pitfalls. Among others it ignores deviations of the return distributions from normality. The asymmetric risk profile of corporate bonds and the illiquidity of certain segments of the [...]
The most appropriate measure of corporate leverage
Sunday, October 25, 2009 21:53 Comments OffWhile the choice of the most appropriate measure of corporate leverage is an arbitrary task, empirical studies indicate that the financing gap is able to explain a lot of the variance in credit spreads. It is defined as the difference between capital expenditures, including outlays for inventories, and the amount of cash that corporations need [...]
The performance of corporate credit
Thursday, October 15, 2009 12:09 Comments OffHaving discussed some of the most influential economy-wide factors for the performance of corporate bonds, we will now examine specific indicators for the state of the US corporate sector. Traditional metrics of leverage focus on the debt-to-equity ratio. The rationale behind this is that a company’s assets are funded by a combination of debt and [...]
The role of employment in credit
Tuesday, October 13, 2009 8:23 Comments OffFor decades economists have analyzed the behavior of various economic indicators during the business cycle. Employment is commonly seen as one of the lagging indicators for the state of the economy. However, there is a leading indicator for the labor sector that coincides with changes in credit spreads. For example, for most of the time [...]