March Starts with a Jump in Mortgage Rates
The big news as we start the month comes from pharmaceutical giant Actavis, which announced back in November that it would buy Allergan for $66 billion. In order to raise the money for this purchase, the company issued a bond deal for something in the area of $27 billion. This is the second biggest corporate bond deal ever made, beaten only by Verizon’s $47 billion deal.
This is a lot of debt to hit the market at once. To give it some perspective, consider that the last deals to have made significant waves amounted to only about $11 billion and $6 billion. Since these corporate bonds have an indirect link to the bonds that dictate mortgage rates, all of this debt is bad news for the housing market.
Unfortunately, with big-ticket events on the horizon, we likely cannot expect the market to correct itself anytime soon.
