(Bloomberg) — A massive wave of corporate distress is pitting beleaguered companies against their lenders in brawls that are shaping up to be nastier than ever before.Desperate firms and their private equity owners are seeking to take advantage of years of weakening creditor protections to help cut obligations and raise cash after the coronavirus outbreak brought businesses to a standstill. Be it via allowances written into borrowing documents when times were good or simply loopholes in deal terms, they’re siphoning collateral and transferring assets while pushing deeply discounted debt swaps onto investors, who risk seeing the value of their bonds and loans plunge if they don’t go along.Still, money managers aren’t just rolling over. Credit powerhouses like GSO Capital Partners, BlackRock Inc. and HPS Investment Partners have lined up scores of lawyers and financial advisers to defend their interests, often finding themselves at odds with one another as they fight for the biggest piece of a shrinking pie. As the gloves come off, industry veterans say tensions are as high as they’ve ever seen.“You have more and more aggressive people holding this stuff and private equity firms have gamed every nook of credit agreements,” said Dan Zwirn, chief executive officer of Arena Investors, which manages $1.4 billion. “As people get desperate, there are going to be a lot more of these.”The conflicts underscore how the legacy of the last crisis is being felt as the current one unfolds. The Federal Reserve’s relentless interest-rate cutting and quantitative easing spurred a surge in demand for higher-yielding assets, helping risky companies sell debt with fewer lender safeguards. Now, amid a fresh bout of economic pain, the effects of those policies are coming to bear.One such fight is currently playing out between Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc. and its creditors.The company through a subsidiary sold $1.8 billion of unsecured notes last year to fund the acquisition of Walt Disney Co.’s regional sports networks. Those securities have plunged as the pandemic left stations with no professional sporting events to televise.Relatively loose provisions in the bond documents have emboldened Sinclair to pursue a debt exchange which would see holders take a 40% haircut and swap into debt secured by the company’s assets.Lenders late last month balked at the terms, and a group led by Shenkman Capital Management organized to block the exchange. The response from Sinclair was ominous: the company said it was weighing other options including a possible maneuver that would shift company collateral out of creditor reach if the exchange offer was not successful.The potential moves were “threats” that appeared designed to pressure lenders, according to Covenant Review, which called the outstanding bond’s safeguards among the weakest it had ever seen.“Issuers are being more aggressive in the way they are going about debt exchanges; they’re looking for additional ways to coerce bondholders that haven’t been interested in participating,” said Scott Josefsberg, an analyst at the debt research firm. “But investors are putting up a fight so far.”Sinclair had imposed a June 9 deadline for the exchange.A representative for the broadcaster had no immediate comment, while Shenkman declined to comment beyond confirming its role leading the creditor group.Sinclair’s exchange offer was hardly the only one to provoke the ire of investors in recent weeks.SM Energy Co.’s efforts to get creditors to swap their bonds into new securities at 50% to 65% of face value have faced significant pushback. With only about 10% of note holders agreeing to tender last month, the oil and gas driller struck a separate agreement with a group of creditors led by BlackRock.The side deal was designed to backstop the exchange, and the BlackRock-led group got better terms for swapping its debt versus what was offered to other creditors. The move infuriated other lenders, who organized with law firm Weil Gotshal & Manges to oppose the deal.Bondholders that accept the exchange must agree to eliminate almost all restrictive covenants on the existing debt, which would hurt anyone who doesn’t participate. The deadline for the tender has been extended to June 12.SM Energy, BlackRock and Weil Gotshal & Manges didn’t respond to requests seeking comment.Revlon ClashAnalysts have been warning investors for years that weakening protections would ultimately have costs as investors ceded more and more ground to borrowers. Yet despite the recent surge in corporate stress, a Moody’s Investors Service gauge of bond covenant quality remained near the weakest on record in April. A similar tracker for loans reached its lowest ever in the fourth quarter, the most recent data available.Lender safeguards played a major role in Revlon Inc.’s contentious $1.8 billion debt overhaul last month.Creditors including Brigade Capital Management and HPS had organized to block the company’s refinancing plan because it allowed the firm to siphon off collateral and use it to back new debt. Supporters of the plan included Ares Management Corp. and Angelo Gordon & Co.The deal needed more than 50% of the holders signed on to close. At first, opposing lenders held a blocking position with a majority of the outstanding loan amount opting out. But Revlon secured a new $65 million revolving credit facility from the supportive lenders — which the company says was permitted under its covenants — ultimately giving it enough backing to push the deal through.Some lenders continue to contest the transaction, arguing that Revlon needed the majority of debt holders of every tranche to agree, and maintaining that the company breached covenants when it moved certain intellectual property to secure a $200 million loan last year, according to people with knowledge of the matter.Still any creditors that chose not to participate in the refinancing were demoted from having a first-priority claim on company assets to a third-lien claim.“Revlon is strengthening its balance sheet and increasing liquidity to better deal with the issues at hand, including Covid-19,” Chief Financial Officer Victoria Dolan said in a statement to Bloomberg. “This group of objecting lenders is trying to block that. We are confident that we will overcome this effort to hurt our company.”Representatives for Brigade, HPS, Ares and Angelo Gordon declined to comment.Transactions involving collateral transfers have been among the most fiercely contested between creditors and private equity firms scrambling to protect their investments.Paul Singer’s Elliott Management Corp. last month became locked in a fight with lenders of global bookings operator Travelport, which Elliott bought last year with Siris Capital Group. The owners shifted intellectual property estimated to be worth more than $1 billion to an unrestricted subsidiary — putting it out of reach of the creditors — to help it raise cash.Lenders led by GSO demanded that Travelport unwind the transaction for violating indenture agreements, and declared the step a default. The owners, who argue it was permitted, told them they would reverse the asset transfer if the creditors provided roughly $500 million of new financing and rolled up some existing debt holdings at a discount.The dispute has gotten so heated, Bank of America Corp. last month surrendered its role as administrator of Travelport’s loan to avoid taking a side in the feud, while Kirkland & Ellis recently resigned as the company’s legal representation, according to people familiar with the matter.With the sides at loggerheads, the private equity owners supplied the financing themselves in a loan backed by the disputed collateral, a move that’s likely to further inflame the situation.Representatives for Travelport, Elliott, Siris, GSO and Bank of America declined to comment, while Kirkland & Ellis didn’t have an immediate comment.‘Fight Like Dogs’Industry veterans say creditors should no longer be surprised when private equity sponsors use asset transfers, spinoffs, carve outs and other such moves following a number of high profile and hotly contested maneuvers in recent years.“Anyone professing to be shocked by it probably hasn’t been around very long,” said Philip Brendel a senior credit analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence.Yet with creditors so far showing little appetite to push for stronger covenants in borrowing documents, market watchers warn to expect more brawls in the months and years ahead.“Rates were suppressed long after they should have been; it drove yield hunger and a non-bank explosion that created misalignments,” Arena Investors’ Zwirn said. “Now they’re learning once again, there are consequences. We are at just the beginning of this thing. They’re going to fight like dogs to avoid those consequences.”For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

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(Bloomberg) — A second wave of coronavirus cases is emerging in the U.S., raising alarms as new infections push the overall count past 2 million Americans.Texas on Wednesday reported 2,504 new coronavirus cases, the highest one-day total since the pandemic emerged.A month into its reopening, Florida this week reported 8,553 new cases — the most of any seven-day period.California’s hospitalizations are at their highest since May 13 and have risen in nine of the past 10 days.A fresh onslaught of the novel coronavirus is bringing challenges for residents and the economy in pockets across the U.S. The localized surges have raised concerns among experts even as the nation’s overall case count early this week rose just under 1%, the smallest increase since March.“There is a new wave coming in parts of the country,” said Eric Toner, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “It’s small and it’s distant so far, but it’s coming.”Though the outbreaks come weeks into state reopenings, it’s not clear that they’re linked to increased economic activity. And health experts say it’s still too soon to tell whether the massive protests against police brutality that have erupted in the past two weeks have led to more infections.In Georgia, where hair salons, tattoo parlors and gyms have been operating for a month and a half, case numbers have plateaued, flummoxing experts.Puzzling differences show up even within states. In California, which imposed a stay-at-home order in late March, San Francisco saw zero cases for three consecutive days this week, while Los Angeles County reported well over half of the state’s new cases. The White House Coronavirus Task Force has yet to see any relationship between reopening and increased cases of Covid-19, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn said on a podcast.But in some states, rising numbers outpace increases in testing, raising concerns about whether the virus can be controlled. It will take a couple of weeks to know, Toner said, but by then “it’s going to be pretty late” to respond.QuickTake: Where Are We in Quest for Coronavirus Drugs, Vaccine?Since the pandemic initially swept the U.S. starting early this year, 2 million people have been infected and more than 112,000 have died.After a national shutdown that arrested the spread, rising illness had been expected as restrictions loosened. The trend has been observed across 22 states in recent weeks, though many increases are steady but slow.In New York, the state hardest hit by Covid-19, Governor Andrew Cuomo only recently started reopening by region. New York City, the epicenter, began the first of four phases Monday.“We know as a fact that reopening other states, we’re seeing significant problems,” Cuomo said Tuesday. “Just because you reopen does not mean you will have a spike, but if you are not smart, you can have a spike.”Experts see evidence of a second wave building in Arizona, Texas, Florida and California. Arizona “sticks out like a sore thumb in terms of a major problem,” said Jeffrey Morris, director of the division of biostatistics at University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine.Arizona SpikeArizona’s daily tally of new cases has abruptly spiked in the last two weeks, hitting an all-time high of 1,187 on June 2.This week, its Department of Health Services urged hospitals to activate emergency plans. Director Cara Christ, told a Phoenix television station that she was concerned about the rising case count and percentage of people tested who are found to be positive.Valleywise Health, the public hospital system in Phoenix, has seen an increase in Covid-19 cases during the past two weeks. It’s expanded its intensive-care capacity and those beds are 87% full, about half with Covid patients, according to Michael White, the chief medical officer.White said Valleywise has adequate protective gear for staff, but hospitals aren’t getting their entire orders. A surge in Covid cases could put that supply under stress, he said.The increase in transmission follows steps to resume business and public life.“Within Phoenix, we’ve been more relaxed than I’ve seen in some of the other parts of the country,” White said, with some people disregarding advice to wear masks and maintain six feet of distance from others. “People are coming together in environments where social distancing is challenging.”Texas on Wednesday reported a 4.7% jump in hospitalizations to 2,153, the fourth consecutive daily increase. The latest figures showing an escalation came as Governor Greg Abbott tweeted a public service announcement featuring baseball legend Nolan Ryan urging Texans to wash their hands and to not be “a knucklehead.”Abbott was criticized for an aggressive reopening last month. Mobile-phone data show activity by residents is rebounding toward pre-Covid levels, according to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s PolicyLab.That could reflect a perception that the virus wasn’t “ever a big threat,” said Morris, who recently moved to Philadelphia after 20 years in Houston.Florida’s health department said in a statement that it attributes the increase in cases to “greatly expanded efforts in testing,” and noted that overall positivity rates remain low, at about 5.5%.Bucking the trend is Georgia, which was the first U.S. state to reopen. Covid cases there have plateaued. Despite local outbreaks in the state, “their sea levels did not rise,” said David Rubin, director of the PolicyLab, which has been modeling the virus’ spread. “They’ve kind of held this fragile equilibrium.”Creeping InCalifornia was the earliest state to shut down its economy over the coronavirus, after one of the nation’s first outbreaks in the San Francisco Bay Area. It has been slower than most to reopen.Even so, the state has also seen the number of people hospitalized with Covid-19 rebound in the past two weeks, as commerce accelerates. Case counts are climbing too, although officials attribute that to increased testing and say it’s a sign of preparation.In part, rising numbers represent the virus spreading into places that largely avoided the first round of infections, including rural Imperial County in California’s southeastern desert. Yet the contagion remains present in places that bore the brunt of the first wave, including Los Angeles County. Hospitalizations there are lower than at the start of May, but deaths remain stubbornly high, with 500 in the past week alone.Barbara Ferrer, Los Angeles County public health director, said the region has likely not seen the end of the first wave. And despite concerns about infections coming out of mass demonstrations in the sprawling city, she thinks the reopening of the economy will have a bigger impact.“We’re not at the tail end of anything,” Ferrer said. “We never had a huge peak. We’ve kind of been within this band. We’re not in decline, we’re kind of holding our own in ways that protect the health-care system.” But, she added, “go to Venice and see the crowds, and you’ll understand why I have concerns.”Another OnslaughtThe U.S. has long been bracing for another wave, but future outbreaks are likely to take a different shape. Social distancing and mask-wearing, as well as careful behavior by individuals, are likely to have staying power even as economies reopen.Experts are steeling for autumn, when changes in weather and back-to-school plans could have damaging repercussions.“The second wave isn’t going to mirror the first wave exactly,” said Lance Waller, a professor at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health in Atlanta. “It’s not snapping back to exactly the same thing as before, because we’re not exactly the way we were before.”Daniel Lucey, a fellow at the Infectious Diseases Society of America, compared the virus’ new paradigm with a day at the beach: The U.S. has been bracing for another “high tide” like the one that engulfed New York City. Today is a low tide, but “the waves are always coming in.”(Adds cases reaching 2 million in headline and first paragraph)For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.

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