Posts Tagged Partnership
Move from loan dependence to independence
Posted by admin in credit, credit cards, economy, effective budgeting, equity on March 16th, 2010
Reaching the Commit stage is the gold medal of partnering— when “me” becomes “we.” As you link your success to each other’s well-being, you move from independence to interdependence.While this goal is sometimes attained in our personal relations, it is elusive for most business partnerships. This doesn’t mean it can’t happen, but long-term partnerships are rare. Businesses change, marketplace realities evolve, and alliances shift market forces in different directions. Achieving this level of partnership ensures that as long as the partnership provides mutual benefits and trust exists, abundance will flow.
The partnership becomes institutionalized when there is formal commitment to it. In our personal lives, people have weddings or other commitment ceremonies to publicly acknowledge their partnerships. Aside from the ritual, which is important, they send a message to the outside world that “we are in this together.” A business example is United Airlines, which ran a series of advertisements featuring their employees, who had just signed an employee ownership contract with management. The message was obvious: Since they were now owner-employees, their customers could expect service as if it were coming from the company leaders—because it was! In an extremely competitive marketplace, this is a powerful message.
How to compensate for default payday risk
Posted by admin in Global Markets, Money Tips, financial information, fixed costs, marketing, material costs on October 23rd, 2009
The spread needed to compensate for default risk depends upon future default rates, recovery rates and ratings transition probabilities. The rating agencies publish their forecasts of future default rates based on historical data. Usually required spreads come out significantly lower than current spreads for investment grade companies. For high yield, however, observed spreads tend to be too low, given the actual risk of default. While over the long term buy-and-hold strategies may earn an excess return over government bonds for pure investment grade portfolios, this strategy is not appropriate for high-yield portfolios. Here, investors need to focus much more on the process of selecting the right companies and avoiding the blowup names. A look at historical data shows that market spreads tend to overshoot at the end of credit cycles, especially in the wake of a recession.
For example, even if the historically high default rates of 1990/91 had persisted over the following years, investors should have required a BBB credit spread of only 115 bps for medium-term bonds. At that time the average market spread for BBB-rated issues, however, peaked at more than 180 bps.
Consequently, the market was much too bearish in 1991. Conversely, in 1997, at the beginning of the severe bear market for credit, spreads were too tight for the period of downgrades and credit blowups that followed. Note that these observations apply for bonds with a maturity of roughly 4 years.
While the cushion is not as comforting as for shorter maturities, even at the long end the spread levels reached in recessions provide sufficient protection, even when assuming that default rates stay high for a sustained period of time.