June 2013 Issue

Debt used to be a dirty word. If a bank pitches a loan to a corporate, they’ll probably ask what the catch is. If a private debt fund manager which that corporate has never heard of does the pitching, they might not even take the meeting. 

Mitigating currency risk in a volatile global economy has never been more important, argues Validus’ Kevin Lester.

Investors are starting to view private debt not as an opportunistic investment but as a strategic one as they grow familiar with the range of products on offer, writes Sanjay Mistry, director of private debt at Mercer.

According to market participants, the UK government’s Funding for Lending scheme will either be negligibly small or dangerously large. But it’s certainly no magic wand.

The nature of risk – and why investors so often misjudge it – were among the topics of discussion when Oaktree’s Howard Marks took to the stage in California recently.

A scarcity of funding options for SMEs is driving demand for debt products in MENA, but can the likes of Gulf Capital successfully replicate a private debt template in the region, asks Magda Ali?

The perils of over-leveraging a business are well understood. Klöckner Pentaplast’s acquisition by Blackstone in 2007 was a boom era deal that finally went bust last year. Magda Ali examines how canny private debt investors including Victor Khosla's Strategic Value Partners, made a killing by picking up the pieces.

With banks and traditional lenders deleveraging, US mid-market companies have a substantial unmet demand for credit. Sam Sutton speaks with the chief executive of THL Credit, James Hunt, about the importance of building relationships to address that need.

The rush to regulate in the wake of the global financial crisis – indeed whilst that crisis was still in full swing – has led to a wholesale reshaping of the way alternative assets managers, and the wider banking community, operate.

There are no hard and fast rules on leveraged lending, but US regulators are keeping close watch of debt levels in the buyout markets and issuing new guidance.

UK real estate debt is attracting attention from new forms of capital including private debt funds as the market adapts to a changing economic environment, writes Laxfield Capital’s Emma Huepfl.

ING is proposing an ‘open-source’ format to help kick-start bank-to-institutional investor debt solutions, the bank’s Alistair Higgins tells Bruno Alves.

With availability of traditional credit shrinking, Brendan Carroll of Victory Park Capital has seen opportunities in providing debt to companies that originate loans for consumers and small businesses.