Intermediate Capital Group has priced the second European collateralized loan obligation of April, keeping year-to-date volume of euro-denominated deals at a record issuance pace of approximately €7 billion.
St. Paul’s CLO IX is a €408 million issuance through Credit Suisse that has a coupon of 82 basis points above Euribor for the €245 million triple-A tranche of notes, according to Thomson Reuters LPC.
It follows last week’s pricing of Investcorp Credit Management EU Ltd.'s €413.5 million Harvest CLO XIX, with a AAA margin of 77 basis points over Euribor.
The European market had its busiest first-quarter issuance level, and second highest-issuing quarter overall, of the post-crisis era with 15 new-issue CLOs with a volume of more than €6.2 billion, compared with €1.2 billion in the first three months of 2017, according to data from Thomson Reuters LPC and Wells Fargo.
The €19.2 billion in volume across 48 new-issue deals for Europe last year was the highest mark in the "CLO 2.0" period since 2011. JPMorgan has previously forecast €25 billion in new deals for 2018.
The outsized supply of new-issue CLOs matches with trends in the U.S., where
Including refinancings, such as Friday’s Grosvenor Place CLO 2015-1 by CQS UK, total deal volume year-to-date has grown to €13.2 billion, compared with €10.8 billion through the mid-April mark of 2017. The full-year 2017 volume was €45 billion, split between €21.4 billion of new-issue volume and €23.6 billion of refinancings/resets.
