Neuberger Berman Shrugs Off Fears Around Junk Bond Market

(Bloomberg) -- One of the world’s largest employee-owned asset managers, which has started more high-yield bond funds in recent years, is shrugging off fears that a global economic slowdown and trade tensions will hurt the asset class.

“The market is very attractive, given that the fundamentals are still very good and corporate credit quality is still good,” Vivek Bommi, a senior portfolio manager at Neuberger Berman with $323 billion in assets, said in an interview. A recession combined with a sharp increase in credit defaults are a couple of years or more away, according to London-based Bommi, whose Neuberger Berman Global High Yield Bond Fund beat 87% of its peers in the past year.

The escalation in the U.S.-China trade spat in recent weeks has brought pain to risk markets and junk debt has been no exception. Other observers have cautioned the effects may linger. UBS Group AG has said that junk note spreads in the U.S. may widen given the severity of the escalation. Firms from Bank of Singapore to JPMorgan Private Bank have cited mounting caution in the Asian debt market due to the trade spat.

The friction has so far weakened but not derailed a rally in global high-yield bonds in 2019. More dovish turns by the Federal Reserve and other central banks around the world, amid a moderating economic expansion this year, have lured investors back to risk assets that had sold off in 2018. Despite falling in recent weeks, high-yield bonds globally have returned 6.7% so far this year, a Bloomberg Barclays index shows.

New York-headquartered Neuberger Berman was finding good value in bonds of cable and wireless telecom companies whose earnings and cash flow weren’t necessarily as cyclical as those of manufacturing firms, Bommi said.

“In the last 10 years, a lot of the more aggressive issuance that may have gone into the high-yield market has gone into other markets like private credit or loan market,” he said. “The market itself has gotten much more healthy.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Mariko Ishikawa in Sydney at mishikawa9@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Andrew Monahan at amonahan@bloomberg.net, Andreea Papuc, Ken McCallum

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