99 Cents Only Stores goes Lite

99 Cents Only Stores operates a chain of over 300 “extreme value retail stores” in California, Texas, Arizona and Nevada.The company was founded in 1982, and in January 2012 it was taken private by Los Angeles private equity firm Ares Management and the Canada Pension...

The Refinancing Cliff Is Coming

The problems of the last leveraged buyout  bubble are still with us.  From 2004 through 2007, the U.S. experienced an unprecedented level of LBO activity.  That all ended with the collapse of the debt markets in the summer of 2007 (and the disappearance of the debt...

Primary and Secondary Markets for Corporate Debt

In earlier posts, we compared the pricing of corporate loans and corporate bonds.  Here, we’ll look at how these markets interact, both in primary issuance and secondary market trading.  First, some definitions:   The Primary Market is where financial...

Loan – Bond Relative Value

In our last post, we described how to compare the cost of a floating rate instrument, such as a loan, to the cost of a fixed rate instrument, such as a bond.  For one company, Jarden Corporation, we showed that the bond’s cost is 50 basis points higher than the...

Jarden Compares Loan and Bond Costs

Jarden Corporation (Ticker JAH) is a diversified consumer products company whose brands include First Alert, Holmes, Mr. Coffee, and Sunbeam.  On June 30, 2009, it had approximately $2.7 billion of debt outstanding, half of which was in the form of Term Loans due...