Posts Tagged ‘Debt’

Corporate spreads of loans and profits

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

Corporate spreads and profits showed a close relationship during past economic cycles. Deteriorating profits as a percentage of GDP go along with wider credit spreads. Market phases with improving profits are accompanied by tighter credit spreads.

The business cycle sets the parameters for the sector rotation strategy. Sectors with a high cyclical component will outperform at the early stages of an economic expansion while noncyclical sectors will tend to underperform during an expansion phase relative to the market. The cyclicality of a sector allows predictions about the development of earnings across business cycles. For example, the business of IT hardware companies depends on the capital expenditure (CAPEX) plans of other companies. In an economic slowdown when CAPEX is scaled back or postponed, IT hardware companies run a higher risk of being downgraded due to a deterioration of their credit protection measures. The most recent examples are the telecommunications equipment companies Alcatel and Ericsson. Both suffered from the lack of demand by telecommunications companies in 2002.

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Macroeconomics of credit industry

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

After analyzing industry life cycles and the competitive environment of industries the macroeconomic environment has to be incorporated in the industry analysis process. For this purpose the focus will be on business cycles and the cyclicality of industries.

Corporate profits hava a long history as a percentage of GDP across several economic cycles. Corporate profits tend to fall long before the economy goes through a recession. Corporate profits usually reach their bottom towards the end of a recession. They start to rebound with rising economic activity. During the last expansion, which was one of the longest and that stretched through the 1990s, corporate profits started to deteriorate already in 1998. Sharply rising equity valuations, a focus on shareholder value and an undisciplined build-up of leverage induced a decline in profits when the earnings growth trend reversed. Every business cycle will be different from past cycles so the task is to identify evolving trends in order to make reliable projections about future performance.

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Posted in economy, finances, global markets, investing, loans, real estate | Comments Off