Borrow It While It's Cheap

Borrow it While it’s Cheap, says Leon Black Apollo Global Management's Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO.

by Terry Stidham

Surrounded by other private equity titans at the Milken Institute’s global conference in Los Angeles, Black said he has never seen such a good debt market.

“The financing market is as good as we have ever seen it. It’s back to 2007 levels. There is no institutional memory,” Black said.

Black was there at the birth of the junk-bond market nearly three decades ago, helping lowly-rated companies raise debt alongside Michael “the junk-bond king” Milken himself.

“We have never seen rates like this,” Black said.

Those rock-bottom financing costs, mind you, aren't going to prompt Black to go on a buying spree. Quite the opposite. Rising equity markets and cash-rich corporations are making it difficult to buy and much easier to sell, the Apollo chief said.

“We are more of a net seller today,” he said. “It’s almost biblical: there’s a time to reap and there’s a time to sow. We are harvesting now.”

So far this year, Apollo has reached a deal to sell its majority-owned Metals USA Holdings for $770.7 million to India’s Reliance Steel, as well as stakes it held in Charter Communications and SourceHOV.

TPG ‘s co-founder David Bonderman, also on the panel, only half-agreed.

“It’s a good time to be a seller but it’s not a terrible time to be a buyer,” because of the cheap financing.

Terry Stidham - President and Founder of Target Search Group. Business Development Leader with extensive knowledge of the M&A process, combined with an in-depth understanding of the constantly changing global capital markets environment.