Credit businesses braced for Q1 carnage

摘要

Amid poor market conditions, US and European credit businesses are preparing to post some of the worst first-quarter results on record, setting them up for an unprecedented fourth straight year of declines. With the reporting season set to kick off in the coming days, executives were braced for a perfect storm of poor performance, after primary and secondary markets were battered by volatility in the first two months of the year, with March unlikely to match the strong showing of March 2015. "Over the past decade, we haven't seen such a prolonged decline in credit markets," said Amrit Shahani, research director at Coalition Development. "The talk from investment banks is that conditions in credit have been brutal."