The Hater's Guide To Bonds With Rob Wigglesworth

In this week's Better Offline, Ed Zitron is joined by Robin Wigglesworth of the Financial Times to explain how both corporate and sovereign bonds work, why you should care, and what you need to know about the tech industry’s growing debt. Rob Wigglesworth: A Fabulous Debt: The Epic Story of How Bonds Built the Modern World https://www.amazon.com/Fabulous-Debt-Story-Bonds-Modern/dp/0593719182 https://x.com/RobinWigg https://www.ft.com/robin-wigglesworth Save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/gzqwkv54e1 YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron Email Me: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 3:40Speaker 08

  Hello, and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

• 3:55Speaker 08

  Now, I've received a lot of lovely emails from you all about how you've enjoyed the show's slow descent into the madness of the financial markets. And so I wanted to bring on one of the titans of industry, author of A Fabulous Debt: The Epic Story of How Bonds Built the Modern World, none other than Financial Times journalist, Robin Wigglesworth. Rob, thank you for joining me.

• 4:13Speaker 09

  No, thanks for having me on, Ed. Been looking forward to it.

• 4:16Speaker 08

  All right, so I'm going to start with a very stupid question. What are bonds and why should the average person actually care about them?

• 4:23Speaker 09

  Yeah, well, actually, it isn't a stupid question because people do get tied up in knots about this all the time, including sometimes people in finance. But they're basically tradable loans. You know how you can buy and sell a stock on a stock market or an app or a brokerage? Well, bonds are just basically tradable pieces of loans that you can buy and sell, just like a stock. And, you know, that can be treasury bonds issued by the US government. They could be gilts issued by the UK government. In Germany, they issue bunds. In Japan, Japanese government bonds. But also big companies like Apple and IBM, they also issue these bonds, these tradable loans, to finance their big operations. Because

• 5:04Speaker 09

  the stock market doesn't actually finance that much. It's really mostly a way for investors to kind of cash out. But if I'm IBM or Microsoft, I want to raise a ton of money to invest in something new, like a new factory or data center, I'm going to be issuing a bond to raise the money for that.

• 5:23Speaker 08

  Right. And of course, the French ones are called obligation assimilable du treasure, or OMs. Anyway, sorry. Moving on from that one. No, so, and you have to be a corporation to issue a bond or a sovereign nation, right?

• 5:39Speaker 09

  Well, you could also be like a multinational organization, like the World Bank issues bonds, the European Union issues bonds. There are individual development banks that kind of state-owned or controlled, but not quite. You can be Chicago. In the US, actually, you have this insanely huge and vibrant municipal bond market that finances like sewage, hospitals, schools, universities. But even the Church of England has issued a bond. It's kind of where most people actually go to finance. There's over half of all debt in the world is actually in the form of bonds now. And pretty much anybody can issue it, even if you and I can't do it.

• 6:19Speaker 08

  That's interesting. So, this is a very specific question. So, do cities sell bonds on the public market? Do they sell them locally, or is it some mixture of the two?

• 6:30Speaker 09

  A mix. Typically, let's say if I'm Chicago and I want to sell a bond, I'll go to a club of banks. They'll act as the underwriters. They'll basically kind of sometimes basically buy the bond off me at a price and then sell it on to investors because they have contacts and the rolodex of all sort of pension plans, insurance companies, mutual funds around the Americas and the world. But they can also sell to individual investors. Like, the municipal bond market in the US is, I think, four or five trillion. A lot of that is actually bought by individual people in their local municipality. But, you know, you can buy, I can go onto a brokerage and buy a little bit of a slice of a US Treasury bond, or even a German bund

• 7:13Speaker 09

  or a UK gilt. Or, in France, like, it's on OATs. But some of the stuff is kind of hard to source up. And, you know, most ordinary individual investors don't kind of spend lots of time going through the bond market.

• 7:28Speaker 08

  So, this is another specific one. So, when you go online and you look at the price of a bond, it's always shown in percentages rather than as the price of the bond. Why is that? And how does, how should a regular person understand that?

• 7:42Speaker 09

  Yeah. And this is, I mean, this is definitely where things get a little bit looped for a lot of people. So, it's a bond, it's a loan with a fixed interest rate. So, let's say if it pays 5% a year. Well, because it trades, like, if you think the economy is going into recession, and everything's going down the drain, and you don't want to buy, hold any stocks, you quite want to hold bonds, and that 5% looks really attractive. You might pay so much for that loan that it starts trading above the par value. So, you're not buying 100, like, $1 worth of bonds for $1. You're buying $1 worth of bonds for $1.10, for example. And then the price is above par. And in fact, even though you're getting

• 8:25Speaker 09

  5% interest, it has a 5% coupon in bond market parlance. The actual interest rate you're going to be getting is lower. And on the flip side-

• 8:36Speaker 08

  Because you paid more, because you paid, so if the bond is paying 5%, but you paid more than the bond was worth, you're effectively getting less than 5%, just so that I understand.

• 8:46Speaker 09

  Exactly. That's it.

• 8:47Speaker 08

  Ah, oh, okay.

• 8:49Speaker 09

  Yeah. And let's say if you think, let's say you're lending money to, I don't know, let's say, Microsoft, and you think Microsoft is doing stupid things, it's investing too much in AI or whatever, and you don't really want to take that credit risk. And you think, maybe, look, I don't think Microsoft is going to go bust, but the bonds might start to weaken. Well, then you can sell it. It might trade below par, and that pushes the market interest rate, the yield, that goes up, which is why you see in financial newspapers like the FT or the Wall Street Journal, will often say that prices and yields move inversely. So, if the bond price is going up, the yield is going down. And if the bond's price is

• 9:29Speaker 09

  going down, the yield is going up. So, generally, lower yields means that it's a solid, strong borrower. That you get less of a return from investing in it because it's safe. And the riskier the bond-

• 9:41Speaker 08

  Because there's less risk.

• 9:41Speaker 09

  There's less risk. And the higher the yield, the more risk there is, and the more chances is that either you might not get your money back at all, or that the value of that bond might be eroded by inflation, for example.

• 9:52Speaker 08

  Right. So, right now, the thing in the news, as you're well aware, is that the US Treasury, the 10-year-dated US Treasury, so 10-year-long loans to the US government, they are selling off, which means that the effective interest rate is higher. Why is the 10-year so important? Why not the 5-year or the 2-year or what have you?

• 10:16Speaker 09

  I mean, it's just custom. If you go back 20, 30 years, you could almost say that the 30-year Treasury yield was the most important one. That was the longest maturity of Treasury bond that the US government would ever issue. And that was kind of what people looked at as a sort of an example of long bond yields. But then actually, the US, and this sounds crazy for us today, but it was actually running such big budget surpluses in the 90s, that it just stopped issuing 30-year Treasuries.

• 10:46Speaker 08

  Oh.

• 10:48Speaker 09

  And basically then, the 10-year just became the default what people look at. And it is, it's kind of, it's not super long, but it's not like a two-year, or five-year, or six-year. A 10-year bond is just a very handy thing that almost every major country on the planet issues. So it's an easier kind of comparisons. It's not always apples to pears to look at Germany versus the US, but at least you can kind of compare 10-year yields. So that's what most people do.

• 11:12Speaker 08

  So why is, so I know, I've seen a lot in the news about how the US has a deficit right now, is in their spending more than they're bringing in, so they have to issue lots of debt. Why, I know it's kind of a silly, obvious question. Why is that such a problem if the US is growing faster than it's issuing debt?

• 11:31Speaker 09

  Well, if it is growing faster than it's issuing debt, that's usually not a problem. And it's the one thing that kind of base, as much as the US government has borrowed an astonishing amount of money, I mean, it's over $40 trillion now in some form or fashion. But the fact that the economy, the economy in the US is growing at a pretty fast rate, and Germany is expected to continue to do so, it is a very large and dynamic and wealthy country. That's why, at least I personally think, I'm not worried about the US going bust anytime soon, really. But yes, if you don't have that growth, or let's say if you're, the costs of servicing that debt, the interest rates that you pay are higher than the rate

• 12:13Speaker 09

  your economy is growing at, well, then you can see stuff start snowballing. And then you also have a budget deficit on top of that. There's just a lot of things generally pointing in the wrong direction.

• 12:22Speaker 08

  Is that's what happening, is that's what's happening in France?

• 12:26Speaker 09

  A little bit. But France both has a lot of debt, it has a big budget deficit, and it has very little growth. And that's kind of, I guess, the Achilles' heel. So it has some advantages over the US, and it has some advantages over other countries as well. France actually is a very wealthy country, but they tax a lot already. Like, it's a high tax system, the government's fairly big. The US actually taxes very little compared to most other big, rich countries. So it could quite easily get on top of its debt problem if there was political will to do so. In France, there's both that kind of lack of growth. It's just growing very slowly. And the fact that politically, look,

• 13:07Speaker 09

  it's not like spending cuts are popular in any country in the world, but they're very unpopular in France. It's just a political system that doesn't really seem to be very receptive to austerity in any form or fashion, which is why

• 13:21Speaker 08

  Yeah, they kind of seem to go to the streets.

• 13:23Speaker 09

  Yeah. I mean, as French people, I love the country, I've lived there, but French people strike for fun. I mean, it's just like, it's a national pastime. If you give them actually something to genuinely be angry about, I mean, then, you know, they

• 13:36Speaker 08

  Then they strike.

• 13:37Speaker 09

  They, they, they strike, and they, they, they like the revolutions as well. So that's why investors are feeling a little bit more worried about those OATs that you mentioned, the French government bond market.

• 13:47Speaker 08

  So data center bonds. So it seems that most of the data center debt has gone out there in a few forms. There's the direct bonds from the hyperscalers, and then there's a lot of SPV and project financing, which isn't bonds. But it seems that, how, perhaps I'll get to the question. How have data, how's data center debt issuance changed all of the bond market? Has it, because I've seen a lot of back and forth about whether it's actually doing stuff, or whether it's not really changing. It's kind of hard to tell.

• 14:19Speaker 09

  No, I mean, it has transformed the debt market over the past year. Initially, a lot of these big data center investments were financed by, I mean, there were some smaller, these NeoCloud, you know, like a core weave, they would have issued bonds to do so. But most of the big hyperscalers, the big serious companies we, we talk about, like Amazon, or Alphabet, and Microsoft, they'll just pay for it. They make so much money on their other products, whether it's Microsoft Office, or YouTube, or WhatsApp, or whatever, that they don't really need. And they had very little debt. It's important to remember, they, they came into this AI boom with extremely little debt, like way

• 15:00Speaker 09

  more cash than they owed. Way more cash. And they were just printing more cash all the time. But then they were investing so much money, that actually the cash they make from their other businesses just hasn't been enough. So it started last year, and this year it's just gone kind of gangbusters. It's, I think, close to $500, $600 billion worth of direct bonds, just kind of bonds you can see trading out there in the market every single day. And then, as you say, a lot of other stuff. Like, they are definitely getting more creative in how they raise money to pay for these data centers.

• 15:37Speaker 08

  Right. And so how has that actually changed the market, though? Has it put an effect on government debt or not? That, that is the debate I was referring to.

• 15:46Speaker 09

  Yeah. Well, so for investors, it means that, like, the nature of the bond market has changed. So the bond market used to be very dominated, like the corporate bond market for companies, used to be very dominated by, like, big utilities, and waterworks, and mining companies, like old world, old economy stuff. And the tech sector just didn't really issue bonds, because they didn't really need to. They either funded themselves with venture capital, or they were so profitable, they never needed to borrow. So the bond market just looks very different from the stock market. The stock market is kind of the mirror image. The stock market is obviously dominated by tech companies, and has been for a very long time. The bond market hasn't. So they have rewritten and kind of reshaped

• 16:27Speaker 09

  the nature of it. To what extent that is affecting and kind of forcing the government's borrowing costs to go up, that's debatable. Scott Besant, the Treasury Secretary of the United States, argues that it has had a meaningful impact, that there's so much supply of these bonds. These, these hyperscalers are hitting up the bond market for such enormous amounts of money, that it is causing almost like indigestion. And that's raising the cost of borrowing for the US government.

• 16:56Speaker 08

  And how does that happen?

• 16:58Speaker 09

  Well, it's just like, if you are an investor, whether it's like me, Robin Wigglesworth, or I'm a bank somewhere, or a pension plan or something, I have a choice in what I invest in. And I don't have an infinite amount of money. Like, the bond market, because, you know, it's paying interest all the time. There's always money coming into the bond market. But you don't have infinite amount of money. So if you have the choice between lending to the US government, or lending to Microsoft, and you think, well, Microsoft isn't as safe as US government, but I'm getting an extra half a percent. Let's say if I can lend money to the US government for 5% a year, for the next 10 years. But for Microsoft, which is pretty safe, I might get 5.5%. If I lend to Oracle, I might get

• 17:40Speaker 09

  6%, 7%. So you can see, it's like a substitution, essentially. But I think people underestimate just how vast the bond market is. I mean, globally, for my book, A Fabulous Debt, I penned it around $190 trillion at the end of last year. So we're probably close to $200 trillion now. So, you know, we're still talking about AI hyperscaler bonds of around half a trillion dollars this year. And that's, that's astonishing. That's wild. But we're still talking, what, like, three months' worth of US Treasury issuance. So it's big, and it's having maybe an impact on the edges. But I don't agree that this is like what's driving up the US government's borrowing costs, as Scott Besant seems to occasionally imply.

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  Yeah, and I specifically wrote about this recently. I think there was an Alfaville piece, can't remember if you wrote it or not, but it was the, maybe it's by, it was this kind of discussion of whether this is actually what is doing it, when it might actually be the 10 year selling off. So the yield is going up or the expected yield is going up is more to do with worries about the US debt and how effectively it's that the markets might think that the US will be paying more interest in the future or they should take more interest from the US government. I think it is.

• 23:39Speaker 09

  Exactly. I mean, it's, I mean, one thing I both love and find incredibly annoying at times with the bond market is like an ink blot test where people can see exactly what they want to see there because at any given time, there's like 20 different factors that play in and with different strengths at different times. And bond yields, like the interest rates that the company or a government has to pay can go up for good and bad reasons. Like if you think the US is in a once in a lifetime economic boom and the AI is going to be amazing and it's all gravy. Well, actually, in a kind of a booming economy, you don't want to lend money to the US government. You want to put money in the stock market or anything else.

• 24:18Speaker 08

  Oh, because you think it would grow.

• 24:20Speaker 09

  Yeah, the economy is going to grow. Yeah, private business, you just have more opportunities. So actually, bond yields are going up for good reasons, that the economy is booming and that's, that's, you want that. On the other hand, bond yields can also go up if you're worried about, well, inflation is going to run out of control, that the Federal Reserve, the independence of the US central bank is under threat from the Trump administration, that you're worried about the US going bankrupt. There are all sorts of reasons that can push bond yields up and down for good and bad reasons. Like if bond yields, like if the US enters a recession now, bond yields will fall. That's not good news for us. We don't want that. But if, if bond yields fall because like the government's credible, that's a good thing.

• 25:05Speaker 09

  But that means you can see whatever you want and you'll have a lot of basically narrative games around this.

• 25:13Speaker 09

  And I think like the AI bond boom is probably a factor, but it's only one factor and it's like lowercase f. There are other things like the Iran war pushing up the price of energy and that just flows into inflation almost mechanistically. And that means that central banks have to raise interest rates. That's like a far, far bigger factor.

• 25:34Speaker 08

  Right, that makes sense. So here's a, here's another question I have had an email or two about. So why do they measure it in basis points? So 0.01%. Why do they measure the movement of a treasury bond, for example, in that, or like even a general bond in that small of a measurement?

• 25:52Speaker 09

  Well, most because it just moves in those such small increments. Like if you are a super junky crappy company that might go bankrupt imminently, your bond yields might move by a percentage point a day. Like one day your bond yield is 8%, the other day it's 10% maybe. It will move around by a lot. But most bonds, and bonds are kind of mostly issued by ideally countries and companies that aren't going to go bankrupt imminently, they move, don't move as much as the stock market. It's arguably why the bond market, despite being far bigger and more important, I'd say far more fascinating than the stock market, it doesn't get the same attention. It just doesn't move around as much.

• 26:35Speaker 09

  So a, let's say if the treasury yield falls 10 basis points or 0.1 percentage point in a day, that's a big move for treasuries. But obviously it sounds pathetic if you say there's 0.1 percentage point. So we just say 10 basis points. Or if something shoots up by 20 basis points, oh, wow, that's a big move for treasuries.

• 26:58Speaker 08

  That's because the market is so big and the move, like there's a small movement can really shift things.

• 27:04Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, especially the treasury market, like as much as it sometimes annoys me, but like even when I sit, I live in Norway these days and even when I borrow money from my bank here, I'm basically competing with the US government for money. Like my bank could always buy a US treasury bond or a Microsoft bond or a French OAT rather than lend to me. So that's why we're all basically in competition for capital in some form or fashion. And that's why the US treasury market as the biggest, baddest bond market on the planet basically sets the cost of money in a subtle way, but in a very real way for everybody else. So even if you don't buy treasury bonds, if you don't even have them in your pension plan, that most people will have, you will be affected by the ebb and flow of the treasury

• 27:49Speaker 09

  market because it just flows into like the cost of money matters in a thousand ways to so many things. So it will affect your life whether you see it or not.

• 28:01Speaker 08

  And that's the 10 year treasury price that generally does that.

• 28:04Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, it's really the whole treasury market. But yeah, the 10 years is just like, is, is what we've chosen as the representative, the easy shorthand for the treasury market. And that's a good proxy for the entire global bond market, essentially.

• 28:17Speaker 08

  Makes sense. So tell, tell to me about junk bonds. What are we looking at there? Because I hear the, the term thrown around in general and by Elliott Smith once in the great song, but it's, it feels like it can mean all sorts of things.

• 28:30Speaker 09

  Yeah, so the bond market, just for reasons of simplicity, is, is influenced by something called rating agencies. I mean, and these are three agencies are called Fitch, S and P and Moody's. And they basically give grades like a teacher gives a student grades on their paper. They give grades to how likely a company or a country or a town or whatever is likely to go bankrupt, to default on its debts. And the best grade is a triple A grade, like it's like, oh, wow, you're really good. I'm in Norway and always triple A rated because we're obscenely wealthy from oil. The US used to have a triple A rating, but no longer has one because it has a lot of debt.

• 29:15Speaker 09

  But like, then you start getting further down and below a level called triple B. And these kind of are silly letters really, but that's what people say. It's kind of there be dragons. So anything from triple B to triple A is considered investment grade, like of varying quality, but broadly speaking, extremely unlikely to default. But below that is what people call sub-investment grade or high yield bonds because they usually have higher interest rates because they're shaky companies. And what you and I typically call junk bonds as a sort of pejorative term, but not always entirely unfair. I mean, they're not junk, but they're, they're big companies there, but they're not as strong.

• 29:56Speaker 09

  They don't have as strong financials as like a Microsoft or the US government.

• 30:02Speaker 08

  So, and these bonds, so I know the hedge, was it investment funds or is it pension funds can't hold junk, right?

• 30:11Speaker 09

  Historically, it used to be so that almost nobody, no self-respecting gentleman, and let's face it, back in the day, it was all men, would buy junk bonds. Junk was actually something you became, like you weren't a company that decided to be non-investment grade. You were typically a big company who had hit bad times and got relegated out of investment grade and they were therefore considered junk. They were called, the, the more poetic name is fallen angel.

• 30:37Speaker 08

  I was going to ask you about those because that happened to Ford during COVID, right?

• 30:42Speaker 09

  Exactly. It's happened to lots of companies really, but it used to be a massive thing. Like if you were a big company and you had issued tons of bonds typically, but you're so indebted that the rating agency ejected you from the investment grade ratings into like double B or below, you wouldn't. Kindly called a fallen angel, but quite often saying, oh, you're you've been junk. You're a junk bond company now. And that's not something people wanted to do because all sorts of investors, like you say, weren't allowed to buy that kind of stuff. But that has changed since the eighties. Now there's a vibrant junk bond market and and anybody can really, I mean, there are companies that literally aspire to be junk bond companies because they think it's more efficient, essentially.

• 31:27Speaker 08

  Why would it be more efficient to be a junk bond company?

• 31:30Speaker 09

  Yeah, it's kind of mind bending, but it's because of the tax treatment of debt. Like, so you can you can deduct your interest payments, just as with mortgage. So if you're a very indebted company, you can actually run quite a bit of debt. You don't want you don't want to be like imminently on the verge of bankruptcy every day. I mean, that's just very stressful if you're the CEO. But you can be a very strong junk company, like rated double B. And in that case, actually, that is, you'll see a lot of private equity owned companies that are

• 32:01Speaker 08

  Right.

• 32:02Speaker 09

  Quite indebted. So the junk rated companies, but they're on the strongest side of it, essentially. Because actually, there's so much money in that market now. It's not like the back in the day where people weren't allowed to invest. So this was changed by a guy called Mike Milken, who I wrote about in my book. He changed that. He kind of changed the perception that junk was bad. They actually pointed out, well, actually, these companies are forced to pay such high interest rates that even if a few of them do go bust, you still make way more money from investing in these sub investment grade companies. So now it's kind of a, I dare I say, almost a bit of a sexy, racy part of the bond market.

• 32:39Speaker 08

  Well, I know it picked up during COVID when the government set interest rates to basically zero.

• 32:44Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 32:45Speaker 08

  And because that was the only way to get any yield, I just dug into a lot of this on a recent newsletter, so it's fresh in my mind. But it seems that there is distress in the lowest quality ones, the triple Cs. What's going on there? So that so triple C is the one just before the ratings agencies basically say you're dying?

• 33:04Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 33:04Speaker 08

  From what I understand.

• 33:05Speaker 09

  Triple C is kind of the lowest rung, but you're still paying your debts. It's kind of the rung that you are very likely that you could die. And that's why that's you'll see triple junk bonds are actually a really good way of spotting economic distress. Because like the stock market is, as you know, Ed, the stock market just falls in love of dreams and narratives and stories. So they quite often don't realize when there's like deep economic problems bubbling up from below. The junk bond market is like, if you buy a bond, the best you can hope for is getting your money back.

• 33:42Speaker 08

  Right.

• 33:42Speaker 09

  You can never you can't you can't make 10x your money, 20x your money, 100x your money in as you can in the stock market. Everybody dreams of buying Amazon or, you know, I guess like Tesla when it was a teeny tiny company. But like in the bond market, you can't do that. So you're just very exposed to the downside. So bond investors are, as humans, they tend towards pessimism. And the junk bond market is the most vulnerable to economic downturns. So you'll see like little, a little bit of skittishness in the junk bond market before you see any rouse. And the way, the place you see it the fastest is the triple C part of the market, because those are companies that might survive if the economy stays healthy, but are exceptionally

• 34:25Speaker 09

  vulnerable because they've got so much debt that like whenever the economy turns, they might very quickly keel over. And that's where we've seen definitely like a bit of skittishness lately.

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  So just so that I I'm following you, because they are the most vulnerable, when things are turning, they're the ones that get hit first.

• 39:28Speaker 09

  Yes, they are kind of, I mean, to stretch a metaphor, it might, I mean, if you're in a movie hall and somebody shouts fire, it's going to be the old people that don't get out of the door quickest, the old infirm that might not get out of the door in the mad scramble. And that's the triple C companies. So those are the ones where you can kind of see worries there where they already borrow so much money, they already pay such high interest rates, they have no margin of safety. They have no nest egg. If the economy turns south, they will get hit very quickly.

• 40:05Speaker 08

  And yeah, even just bringing up the ratings agency right now, they're dependent on favorable business, financial and economic conditions to meet their financial commitments. So yeah, it's, it's, that's fascinating. I never even thought of it like that, even though it's blatantly obvious. So here is another thing. Why is it though, that say, let's look at CoreWeave or actually SpaceX is a better example. SpaceX got rated investment grade despite the fact that it has negative revenue. It lost billions of dollars. How is that possible? Because it seems like the ratings agencies will rate companies that in their current state would run out of money just because they could theoretically stop doing something stupid.

• 40:49Speaker 08

  Is that, what is the logic behind these decisions?

• 40:53Speaker 09

  Well, it's mostly, and it does get a little bit loopy at times, but it's mostly that SpaceX is valued so highly by the stock market. So companies and countries are very different, but companies have something called a capital structure. Like there's a hierarchy of who gets wiped out. The last people are typically, like if you're a banker and you've lent to SpaceX, you've typically got all sorts of very fancy covenants in your loan documents. You're considered senior. You will only take a hit if everybody else gets wiped out. And then you have maybe normal bondholders that just have normal securities. Then you might have something, and it varies from company to company, but there'll be maybe some preferred equity or

• 41:36Speaker 09

  some mezzanine financing, it's called. But then the first people to get hit is SpaceX, ex shareholders. So it's like

• 41:44Speaker 08

  And when you say get hit, what do you mean? As in the value of their shares go to zero?

• 41:49Speaker 09

  Yeah. So let's say if SpaceX was to declare bankruptcy tomorrow for some reason, then the equity is worthless. The stock is valueless. And it means that basically then you'll start getting hit and hit. Then the bigger the losses, the deeper into the kind of the debt stack, things start to eat. It's like house termites eating your house. They'll start eating the bottom bit first and the top, you'll be fairly shielded.

• 42:14Speaker 08

  You could get out of the house. As in like, so bondholders would get paid back out of the, or the top of the stack, the senior debt, they would get paid first?

• 42:22Speaker 09

  Yes, they always get paid first. Stockholders don't get paid anything at all really, unless there's a dividend or anything like that. So the reason why SpaceX to a large extent is investment grade, despite having like, on the face of it, fairly funky financials, is that there's so much value in that equity. It's like the stock market values SpaceX so, so highly that it is almost inconceivable. Like they have a lot of cushion there essentially. They can probably always sell more stock. They can issue more debt. So the chances are they will be fine. Like the market has given them a big fat lifeline essentially. But that

• 43:03Speaker 09

  can change fairly quickly. I mean, it won't go tomorrow or next year, but the market can also be very fickle about these things.

• 43:12Speaker 08

  How quick, how quickly will a company get rerated? Is there any kind of, is there any kind of standard for that? Or is it just if S and P wakes up and looks at, looks at something and goes, oh crap?

• 43:23Speaker 09

  It's very situational, as it were. Most times, rating agencies check in once a year or twice a year. Like they won't check in on the US government once a year because it kind of, we know nothing changes radically there. But they can, they can, so there'll be like scheduled reviews for a credit rating. But there will also be like, if obviously something big happens. A great example of this is Wirecard, a German payments company that proved to have

• 43:49Speaker 08

  SoftBank portfolio company?

• 43:51Speaker 09

  Yes, exactly. Another one of SoftBank's favorites. They, they know how to pick them. But Wirecard ended up like proving to be a massive fraud. They had an investment grade rating and sold a bond. And actually, there was one bond, I think, that literally went into default before they'd make it, made a single interest payment. That's very, very rare.

• 44:12Speaker 08

  That's so cool. I love. Well, actually with that in mind, I had a question about SoftBank. So SoftBank apparently issues a lot of retail bonds

• 44:22Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 44:22Speaker 08

  in Japan. What are those?

• 44:25Speaker 09

  Well, so different markets will have different characteristics. I always joke that the bond market comes in more flavors than Baskin Robbins. And, and you know, in some countries like Italy, they're like, it's like a custom for ordinary Italians to buy bonds at their, their post office or the brokerage. There isn't that much history of that in the US, but you can buy treasury bonds directly from the US government if you want to. The government set up a site, you can do it on Robinhood and stuff like that. But most countries, it's not that simple or straightforward to buy bonds. Most bonds are bought by big institutions like a pension plan on behalf of their investors, ordinary people. But in Italy, Japan, there is what they call a retail bond market. There's a fairly big one in Germany as well, weirdly enough. But yeah, you can, because everybody

• 45:10Speaker 09

  in that country might just be a bit more loyal, feel a bit more comfortable with you, feel a little bit safer, you're a household name. So it's easier for you to fund yourself at home by selling bonds to ordinary investors in your own home country, as it were. But you know, SoftBank borrows so much money. They, they borrow in all sorts of currencies around the world, really.

• 45:33Speaker 08

  And I know that Japan is, well, they're exiting this, but I know one of the reasons SoftBank sells those bonds is because Japanese government bonds have until recently not really paid interest?

• 45:45Speaker 09

  Yes, exactly. So Japan has had extremely low interest rates for really like 30 years until recently. Because it had this, this massive economic crisis and a huge problem with deflation and debt for a long time afterwards. And so bond yields and so the central bank just kept interest rates floored at zero or even below zero for, for a period. And that, yeah, if you're a Japanese investor and in your bank account, or even in like a government bond, you basically get zero. You're going to start looking for other stuff that yields a bit more. And that's like a huge boon for companies that want to borrow money. So we've seen a lot of not just Japanese companies, but lots of other companies as well, borrow

• 46:30Speaker 09

  in Japanese yen and then swap the yen for dollars if they want dollars or euros.

• 46:35Speaker 08

  And that is the yen carry trade?

• 46:37Speaker 09

  Yes. So carry is just basically if you borrow money in a cheap country and that invest it in somewhere else where you hopefully make more money on those. So let's say if you can borrow yen at 1% for 10 years and invest it in dollars yielding like a dollar bond at 5%, that's like a, in theory, and it's important to stress theory, that's like a 4% premium. But the problem is that currencies move around a lot. So you can get easily get wiped out on the carry trade. So it's always one of those kind of popular things when the world is, looks safe and fine. And then it kind of blows up in people's faces when it suddenly doesn't.

• 47:16Speaker 08

  It's fascinating as well. I was reading a story about those retail bonds a couple of days ago and how Masayoshi Son, the CEO of SoftBank, has this incredible cult following, partly with sports fans, because there's a SoftBank sponsored team. But it's, there are regular people that buy the bonds because of Masayoshi Son. It's just a completely different thing than you'd have over here in America, partly because we don't have zero interest rates or didn't for a long time. And so like a company basically steps in almost like a sovereign bond issuer.

• 47:48Speaker 09

  Yeah. It will just like, maybe just benefits from low interest rates. But like, interest rates were pretty low in the US for a long time and that benefited all sorts of companies there too. And, and that kind of investing, not to make financial returns, but almost like an expression of your identity. I mean, that's very much alive in the US. Just look at Tesla or even SpaceX, right? We were talking about SpaceX. SpaceX is not valued as a normal company. It's valued as like by like Elon Musk fanboys and, and girls who will just give him money because they believe in him. And it is not something that is, it is entirely divorced and unanchored for any sort of normal financial analysis.

• 48:31Speaker 09

  It's just what people do. But like what people are doing with SpaceX in the US was the stock. I guess, I didn't know this about Japan, but like maybe Japanese investors are doing with SoftBank bonds over there.

• 48:43Speaker 08

  Kind of. Actually, this leads me to my final and most complex question. So with that in mind of all of the, the bonds that were raised during the interest free era in 2020, 2021, talk to me about maturity walls. So how big is the, when I say maturity wall, just for the listeners, it's a bunch of debt, the bonds that were issued in, when interest rates were low in 2021, 2020, that are coming up for refinancing. How big a problem is this going to be? Or has this problem already started?

• 49:16Speaker 09

  I have to admit, like maturity walls, it's just basically, let's say if I'm like Wiggles Corp. And I've issued like a few bonds maturing at different years. So let's say I have next year, I only have a billion dollars worth coming due. The year after that, I've got like four billion. And then suddenly in 2028, I've got like $10 billion coming due. And look, you'll see this, this bar chart and it looks like a wall, which is why people call it the maturity wall. In practice, if you look at almost every big borrower, and certainly like a government that issues bonds every year, like every quarter, some big companies and, and governments will issue bonds, it will always look like a wall.

• 49:55Speaker 09

  So like, I, I speak as somebody who's written, God knows how many articles over the years about worries about a maturity wall that, you know, always looks scary and could potentially become scary. But as long as the economy is fine, then it's generally fine. But there is a difference now that of course, some of these maturities are for companies that just as of yet, don't make that much money. Like the hyperscalers, most of them, Oracle accepted, still make obscene amounts of money.

• 50:25Speaker 08

  Oracle's cash flow negative right now. Oracle, Oracle is in a very weird spot though, because they are threat, they, they run the risk of becoming a fallen angel. But I understand what you mean.

• 50:36Speaker 09

  Yeah, no, Oracle is definitely one that kind of sticks out. And all, all those companies could get in trouble, I guess in theory, but like they'll have to borrow a lot more before I really start freaking out about them. Oracle does look like the, the, the, the thinner leopard in the herd, as it were. And um, this, this wall, it could hit. But most companies like it's what we screw up all the time. What people get wrong is, is like the stuff that we know about is very hard to mess up. Like if you see a big fat hurdle ahead of you, you have to know and jump over it. You might, maybe you won't be able to do it, but at least you have time to prep, you can do it.

• 51:18Speaker 09

  It's not like these, but these companies don't know they have a bond coming due in January 2027, for example. They know they have to plan ahead and as long as the company is not looking too shaky, they refinance. Like most companies don't actually repay their debts, they just roll their debts. So if

• 51:35Speaker 08

  And that just means issuing more bonds to pay off the old ones.

• 51:38Speaker 09

  Yeah. So if Wiggles Corp has a billion dollar bond coming due in January 2027, I'll just at some point between now and then issue another billion dollar bond to get the money before that comes due and repays that. And normally that's not that dramatic. The problem is when that maturity wall collides with an economic downturn. So maturity walls in isolation are very rarely problematic. But if the maturity wall either is there, you see it with like a company that doesn't generate a lot of cash. So like maybe investors won't be around to lend to them, or just the economy goes south. At the same time that you have these big payments coming to you.

• 52:20Speaker 09

  Let's say if I Wiggles Corp suddenly goes like, has like, starts losing lots of money between now and January. Well, maybe nobody wants to lend me that billion dollars. And that's when things can get dicey. So the maturity wall is, I always kind of stress that it is not dangerous in isolation and bond maturities always kind of look like a scary wall. And can, and can be made to look like a scary wall. But when it's only, or primarily causes problems when it actually, that maturity walls happens to coincide with like deep economic recessions. And those are unfortunately extremely hard to predict.

• 52:57Speaker 08

  Well, Rob, this has been genuinely wonderful. I'm going to direct everyone to download and buy and read your book because it's phenomenal. I'm really genuinely really excited to have had you on because I think this is a subject that is very soon going to hit the tech industry quite hard. So thank you for joining me.

• 53:14Speaker 09

  Yes. No, thanks, Ed. I really appreciate it. I definitely think the tech industry is discovering the joys of debt. And, and quite often after that, people discover the, the destruction that debt can cause as well. So it's going to be interesting to see how things shake out.

• 53:28Speaker 08

  Thanks so much for joining me.

• 53:38Speaker 08

  Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M A T T O S O W S K I dot com. You can email me at [email protected] or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat dot where's your ed dot at to visit the Discord and go to r slash better offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

• 54:10Speaker 07

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