Honk: Bond Market Health Check
https://www.hnworth.com/article/2019/04/29/honk-bond-market-health-check
How safe are the bond markets anyway?
That would be the tougher question it would appear than car horns but there is no turning back. After another close call last week, with CWT Singapore’s close shave with bond markets and managing to redeem their SGD bond maturity just days after their parent, HNA-controlled
CWT International (521 HK), triggered a cross default. Luck would be on the Singapore market’s side (much similar to those Swiber bonds that were redeemed just weeks before the company defaulted with no impropriety found) as
CACHE Logistics’ and
AIMS Reit’s bonds get some room to breathe aside of the CWT contagion.
It does not help that the S&P rating agency had to audaciously poke their noses into the Singapore markets injecting a dose of pessimism, despite not being a big player in the local rating scene, we would wonder where they have been all these years and given that Moody’s is the preferred rating agency as far as Singapore dollar bonds are concerned.
Yes, the only ones happy for a default would be the reporters mainly, reveling in the
Hyflux debacle right now to fill those pages with “newsworthy” news, “tabloid” style as it continues to drag with this week’s smoke-and-mirrors stunt and the sudden emergence of a new white knight at the 11th hour.
As for the frantic friend who had called asking for an opinion on his
NOL bond (price fell off a cliff), our unsympathetic reply, “Told you to sell them, no, when you were up 10% last year?”
And the sentiments did not improve much this week after Bloomberg published another sensational new Singapore default watchlist which had to include that NOL bond of his, along with the other CWT that is maturing next year,
Lippo Malls, Oxley and
Vibrant Group.
We suspect the reporter must have sought inspiration from a similar source and yet we wonder why
First REIT and
Pacific International Lines were not brought up.
It is scarce comfort knowing that Singapore’s “zombies” are nearly flushed out of bond markets, with just Hyflux left although we cannot be sure if fraud continues to pop up, like the problem SGX has with this Best World for misrepresenting their Chinese assets, this week.
On the default count, and including the exchanged bonds, it has been over SGD 4 bio, thanks to Hyflux for ratcheting the number up by SGD1.35 billion although the perpetuals are not in default status yet. Here is a little tombstone for the fallen names since 2015.