The trend of companies moving from the unsecured corporate CP market to the ABCP market has accelerated lately, driven by recent headline risk and the increased tiering from in today's skittish investor community.
Cited from Credit Suisse First Boston's ABCP research, "Investors continue to be very credit conscious and are willing to back away from issues with any negative news concerning their companies... Asset backed issuers saw very good interest from one- through three-month Libor less three to seven."
The industry has noted this trend developing for the past year and half, when large, once-credit worthy entities like Lucent Technologies began selling assets into the ABCP market.
Lately, companies like The CIT Group/Tyco, Qwest Corp. and Sprint Corp. have announced difficulties rolling over their corporate paper, and will likely beef up their use of receivables securitization, if they haven't already. For example, CIT last week announced it had established a $1.2 billion accounts receivables facility with JPMorgan and CSFB.
