Revenue Rise with Loans

I once worked with a telecommunications company whose mission included the goal “to maximize our stock portfolio.” The leadership decided this meant they should partner with a financial institution in order to manage their portfolio more efficiently. What they needed was a partner to help them—an investment bank—but what they did was acquire a bank [...]

The asymmetric distribution of corporate bond returns is easily explained by the Merton model introduced earlier. Numerous studies substantiate that even the return distributions of less risky and more liquid asset classes like government bonds are skewed and leptokurtic. Moreover, index returns exhibit significant autocorrelation that can be explained partially by a permanent component. Basically, [...]

While 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 [...]

Yet, free cash flow numbers are not available for all companies. European firms, for example, historically have published only profit figures. Therefore, we also look at EBIT and EBITDA figures. Of these two the latter is preferred because it deducts cash that is needed to maintain the operations. Specifically, on the macro level we use [...]

So far, we have identified a close correlation between credit spreads and future economic activity. When the economy is growing, usually each sector benefits from that growth. In the labor sector, economic growth typically leads to falling unemployment and rising wages. Historically, the corporate sector has benefited particularly during economic expansions. Not only did corporate [...]

Generally, in growing economies the nominal level of debt rises over the years. This is mostly because of inflation and a steady growth in balance sheets. The long-term upward trend has accelerated sharply since 1980, coinciding with the sustained fall in short- and long-term interest rates and inflation rates. Since then, the steadily falling level [...]

For 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 [...]