> Unless the company have a lot of fairly stable semi-liquid assets (like real estate)...
replyThat's exactly what happened famously with Red Lobster. PE sold off all the underlying real-estate to get the initial sugar-high and replaced it with a leasebacks. Those leases had escalating costs and fixed terms, which made it difficult to adapt to changing trends, and was a big contributor in what ultimately sunk it all.
Non-bank entities being in play is likely part of the problem. If you can sell the bad debt to some other entity say a fund that got investment from pension you win. For fund managers these things can look great on paper and that is everything that matters. Even if things do not workout they can on paper extend and pretend or take payment-in-kind. Meaning well you are short on interest payments so you just tack it on the principal.
replyAnd everyone gets their management fees until people start asking their money back...
Ah so it is related to that whole private debt markets, the loans these PE companies take are not with banks. It is related to that whole thing with Trump opening those kind of loan investments to ordinary americans and pension funds.
replyGreat another financial crisis.
Most fun thing is that even if bank can't led to these sort of companies they can lend to companies that lend to them... So added fun. And well this has been going on for long time and cracks have started properly showing up more recently.
replyDoes "the bank" know that it is unviable?
replyCheck the other comment, apparently these loans don't come from banks, but rather from private debt markets. And most likely they don't know these loans aren't viable.
reply