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Junk-Bond Sellers Desperate for Funding Swallow Yields over 10%

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51–60 of 73 posts

Re: Junk-Bond Sellers Desperate for Funding Swallow Yields over 10%

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're lending money for interest, then the interest is taxable income just as any other revenue. What do you propose should be changed?

You are misunderstanding. The GP is not talking about you lending money, but about you borrowing it. As it stands if you borrow $1m and pay $50k in interest as you pay back the loan, that $50k is considered a business expense and reduces your tax liability.

Yes, and why shouldn't it be so?

Off the top of my head, two simple arguments why excluding interest from business expenses does not make sense, there probably are a bunch more:

1. Double taxation - if I my operating profit is $100 but I pay all $100 in interest, then that $100 gets taxed twice; when I receive it and when the lender receives it. Such double taxation is bad because it arbitrarily changes depending on where you put the "legal entity boundary" - if the "earner" and "lender" were a single entity, then they would pay much less taxes; so such a double taxation regime would result in large financial incentives towards vertical integration of conglomerates and artificially punish fragmented businesses, which is generally opposite from what we'd want to facilitate.

2. Introducing asymmetry between owning and renting assets. Rent is considered a business expense (if the proposal wants to change that as well, then it's a much bigger change with other considerations), so any current scenario where a company is borrowing money and using it to buy capital assets (buildings/cars/land/machinery/whatever) can be replaced with an equivalent deal where the "lender" is buying the assets and leasing them. If interest does not reduce taxable income but rent does, then a huge portion of commercial credit would be restructured overnight to leasing for an arbitrary artificial reason, so you would not really gain that much extra tax revenue but would introduce all kinds of bad economic incentives (it's generally better for all the business domain-specific assets such as custom machinery to be on the balance sheets of the companies where they're useful, not belonging to generic lenders, especially in various economic crisis situations) for no good reason.

If you want to tax companies more, just raise the tax rate. Adding various artificial rule differences just adds complexity and all kinds of perverse incentives to structure transactions in weird ways so that they fit the arbitrary distinctions created by these rules.

Saying "today, interest is a special kind of expense that's taxed more" is effectively a subsidy to law and accounting firms to restructure all the corporations so that they do the same business without having transactions that technically are "interest". Case in point, Islamic banking system where interest is prohibited as such - lenders still earn the same money from lending (e.g. Murabahah gets you almost the same end situation as "normal" western loans), it just has to be structured in complicated ways.

Re: Junk-Bond Sellers Desperate for Funding Swallow Yields over 10%

#52
post #38

In the 80s, we were borrowing money for mortgages (secured by houses with tenants and 20% downpayments) at rates over 15%. I don’t find yields over 10% given the current economic climate to be unreasonable or evidence of “desperation” on the part of sellers. I would probably find rates of under 10% as evidence of desperation on the part of buyers...

In order to draw a conclusion, we should look at the _real_ interest rate vs. the nominal one.

Real interest rate depends on inflation which is an invented phenomenon of the 20th century. Inflation wasn't relevant in the preceding century and might not be relevant in 21st century either.

At least not in the current form it is measure as a CPI while ignoring asset price inflation in real estate and stock markets.

Whether that is a bug or feature remains to be seen, but for most people a psychological effect of large inflation has been present at least since the last big ceisia in 2008. Banks keep flooding the economy with new QE money and asset prices and rent payments keep increasing. Many people are not able to afford housing and birth rates plummet for not being able to have stability necessary to raise a family.

Whether somebody adds a patch to the inflation theory such as the concept of Biflation (inflation in asset prices, deflation in cheap goods manufactured by robots and imported from China at the same time) or throws thr concept of inflation out of the window completely is the question for economists for this century.

Re: Junk-Bond Sellers Desperate for Funding Swallow Yields over 10%

#53
post #48

In the 80s, we were borrowing money for mortgages (secured by houses with tenants and 20% downpayments) at rates over 15%. I don’t find yields over 10% given the current economic climate to be unreasonable or evidence of “desperation” on the part of sellers. I would probably find rates of under 10% as evidence of desperation on the part of buyers...

Well, the economy is deflating fast, which means the riskfree rate is in the toilet. The current 10% is equivalent to closer to 30%-35% in the early 80s. The fact that the economy is "pretty bad" doesn't necessarily imply that all rates should be low or high. They can be either very high (inflation) or very low (deflation), and both are not good signs.

> The current 10% is equivalent to closer to 30%-35% in the early 80s.

Could you explain this more?

Re: Junk-Bond Sellers Desperate for Funding Swallow Yields over 10%

#54

In the 80s, we were borrowing money for mortgages (secured by houses with tenants and 20% downpayments) at rates over 15%. I don’t find yields over 10% given the current economic climate to be unreasonable or evidence of “desperation” on the part of sellers. I would probably find rates of under 10% as evidence of desperation on the part of buyers...

My dad built our house in 1971 and the rate for his mortgage was 6% but less than ten years later it was 21.25%, crazy! Even the 6% was a stretch he has to join a co-op. It was kind of like an early Habitat for Humanity but your group did it all yourself.

Re: Junk-Bond Sellers Desperate for Funding Swallow Yields over 10%

#55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are misunderstanding. The GP is not talking about you lending money, but about you borrowing it. As it stands if you borrow $1m and pay $50k in interest as you pay back the loan, that $50k is considered a business expense and reduces your tax liability.

Yes, and why shouldn't it be so? Off the top of my head, two simple arguments why excluding interest from business expenses does not make sense, there probably are a bunch more: 1. Double taxation - if I my operating profit is $100 but I pay all $100 in interest, then that $100 gets taxed twice; when I receive it and when the lender receives it. Such double taxation is bad because it arbitrarily changes depending on…

[deleted]

Re: Junk-Bond Sellers Desperate for Funding Swallow Yields over 10%

#56
post #21
post #20

This is unsustainable debt levels. It's like living on credit cards. These companies and countries should be downsizing.

At the moment? Downsizing employers in the emergency will likely wreck the recovery, and you can't "downsize" a country without a body count.

For an example of that see: 1929 & Money Supply Reduction.

Re: Junk-Bond Sellers Desperate for Funding Swallow Yields over 10%

#57

Can anybody who understands better than me explain how this links to central banks' quantitative easing policies and the big macroeconomic picture?

It doesn't directly. The central banks have lowered "safe rates" down to zero and sometimes below, but desperate businesses still have to offer high yields over 10% to find willing lenders.

Re: Junk-Bond Sellers Desperate for Funding Swallow Yields over 10%

#58
post #38

In the 80s, we were borrowing money for mortgages (secured by houses with tenants and 20% downpayments) at rates over 15%. I don’t find yields over 10% given the current economic climate to be unreasonable or evidence of “desperation” on the part of sellers. I would probably find rates of under 10% as evidence of desperation on the part of buyers...

In order to draw a conclusion, we should look at the _real_ interest rate vs. the nominal one.

Market inflation expectations are very low:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T5YIE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10YIE

Which means these high yields are more of a sign of high risk of default than of high inflation. :-(

Re: Junk-Bond Sellers Desperate for Funding Swallow Yields over 10%

#59
Is this a buy signal for some of these travel or travel related companies I wonder? I can see them having a issue with cashflow now, but its not always going to be like this, people will need rental cars, maybe not as many, but they will need them. Potential consolidation first to reduce capacity and then price rises.

Re: Junk-Bond Sellers Desperate for Funding Swallow Yields over 10%

#60
post #48

In the 80s, we were borrowing money for mortgages (secured by houses with tenants and 20% downpayments) at rates over 15%. I don’t find yields over 10% given the current economic climate to be unreasonable or evidence of “desperation” on the part of sellers. I would probably find rates of under 10% as evidence of desperation on the part of buyers...

Well, the economy is deflating fast, which means the riskfree rate is in the toilet. The current 10% is equivalent to closer to 30%-35% in the early 80s. The fact that the economy is "pretty bad" doesn't necessarily imply that all rates should be low or high. They can be either very high (inflation) or very low (deflation), and both are not good signs.

Real interest rate are ususally defined as Nominal Rate-Inflation, so with inflation at virtually zero, the real rate is 10% for them. To be 35% we would need deflation of roughly that much. Though a 10% real rate is bad enough.
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