At the start of the year Lucine Kirchhoff took a bold position. The price of high-grade loans, she said, was destined to increase: "Look for investors to focus more on drawn pricing to compensate for the appropriate risk they are taking," said Kirchhoff, the head of loan syndicate at Banc of America Securities. It would be a similar story for undrawn costs. Higher pricing ought to have been inevitable given the recession, a rise in defaults, rating-agency downgrades and fallen angels, and the uncovering of corporate frauds. Banks would surely be looking for a much better return for the risks they were taking, which would imply a wholesale change in prices rather than just a slight increase.
November 01, 2002