Clear Channel prices week’s sole dollar deal; junk slides as oil, stocks fall; Third Avenue angst

By Paul Deckelman and Paul A. Harris

New York, Dec. 11 – The high-yield primary market – finally – saw its first dollar-denominated pricing in a week on Friday.

But the smallish deal from Clear Channel International BV, coming late in the session, was largely overshadowed by a broad-based market downturn.

Traders said that Junkbondland moved lower in tandem with a selloff in equities sparked in part by the continued erosion in world crude oil prices that has seen them driven down to their lowest levels in at least seven years.

That helped to hammer junk oilers such as California Resources Corp., Chesapeake Energy Corp., EP Energy Corp. and WPX Energy, Inc.

Even away from the recently beleaguered energy and mining spheres, traders said that junk in general was lower, some issues by multiple points, as the market followed the lead of sagging equities.

Adding further to the negative witch’s brew were investor jitters on Thursday’s news that Third Avenue Management LLC plans to liquidate its underperforming Third Avenue Focused Credit junk bond mutual fund, barring investor redemptions while it winds the fund down, and similar news on Friday about Stone Lion Capital Partners LP, which barred redemptions in its credit hedge funds.

Statistical measures of junk market performance were lower across the board for a fifth consecutive session on Friday.

They were also lower all around versus where they had finished out last Friday – the first lower week after three straight weeks during which the indicators had been mixed.

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