From Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:
And the next crisis hasn’t even begun yet.
We have warned about “open-end” bond mutual funds, particularly those with a lot of high-yield bonds. We know some folks who got burned when Charles Schwab’s $13-billion bond fund SWYSX blew up during the financial crisis and lost 60% or so of its value before its data went offline.
Schwab settled all kinds of class-action and individual lawsuits for cents on the dollar. It got in trouble over other bond funds. And other purveyors of bond funds got in trouble too.
It works like this: When an “open-end” bond fund starts losing money, investors begin to sell it. Fund managers first use all available cash to pay investors. When the cash is gone, they sell the most liquid securities that haven’t lost much money yet, such as Treasuries. When they’re gone, they sell the most liquid corporate paper. As they go down the line, they sell bonds that have already lost a lot of value. By now the smart money is betting against the fund, having figured out what’s happening. They’re shorting the very bonds these folks are trying to sell.
The longer this goes on, the more money investors lose and the more spooked they get. It turns into a run. And people who still have that fund in their retirement account are getting cleaned out.
Bond funds can be treacherous – especially if they hold dubious paper, which is never dubious until it suddenly is. And when they get in trouble, you want to be among the first out the door. Here’s one of our more recent warnings on open-end bond funds, May 20 this year: Are These Ticking Time Bombs In Your Portfolio?
The $1.8-trillion or so of US junk bonds are everywhere. Investors loved them because they have discernible yields in the Fed-designed zero-interest-rate environment. Junk bonds were hot, and so were the funds. People went for them, with no idea that they were putting their nest egg in a fund larded with explosives.
A significant part of Corporate America is junk rated, well-known names like Chrysler, Valeant Pharmaceuticals, or iHart Communications, yup, the LBO wunderkind owned by private equity firms and weighed down by $8.9 billion in debt that is now “distressed.”
They issue debt because they’re cash-flow negative and need new money, or because they gorge on M&A, or have to fund share-buybacks and special billion-dollar dividends back to the private equity firms that own them. During the boom years of the credit bubble, nothing could go wrong. And now, as ever more junk bonds wither, crash, default, and cause their owners to tear out their hair – just then, a bond fund implodes.
To continue reading: Junk-Bond Fund Implodes, Investors Stuck
