The Junk Bond Reckoning Is Coming in 2023
Companies have been able to put off borrowing at high rates, but they must start to address the wall of high-yield maturities coming in 2024.
The wall of expiring debt looks daunting in 2024.
Photographer: Joseph Prezioso/AFP/Getty Images
Ever so subtly, the high interest rates of the past year have started to separate the viable businesses from the ones sustained by cheap money. Expect 2023 to kick that process into high gear.
Interest rates started surging in late 2021 as the Federal Reserve began to acknowledge that inflation wasn’t “transitory,” but relatively few companies have had to deal with the consequences. Many of them met their near-term borrowing needs during the first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, when rates were unusually low. Defaults and bankruptcies have begun to inch up since then, but only slowly and from extraordinarily low levels.