Is This How the Spillover Effect on Mortgage Debt is Defined?

Let someone else define this as the spillover effect or contagion from mortgage debt, but it looks like the more conservative portions of the credit markets are beginning to have some reservations about what they are buying. The days of easy money are coming to big bump in the road, actually they are probably over.

This article also contains a good summary about how the US Food Service bond offering developed, actually failed to launch. Also discusses how toggle bonds work and upcoming large bond offerings for LBOs. From Bloomberg:

The world's biggest bondholders have had their fill of leveraged buyouts, convinced that increasing mortgage delinquencies will drag down the U.S. economy and drive debt-laden companies into default.

TIAA-CREF, which oversees $414 billion in retirement funds for teachers and college professors, is boycotting some debt offerings used to finance LBOs. Fidelity International, a unit of the world's largest mutual fund company, and Lehman Brothers Asset Management LLC, the money-management arm of the third- biggest bond underwriter, say they're avoiding debt from buyouts.
Investors are getting skittish just as private-equity firms led by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. and Blackstone Group Inc. prepare to sell $300 billion of bonds and loans to finance LBOs, according to Bear Stearns Cos. In the past two weeks alone, more than a dozen companies were forced to postpone or restructure debt sales.

``There are some very scary analogies between high yield and the mortgage market,'' said Kevin Lorenz, a managing director who oversees $2.5 billion of high-yield assets at TIAA- CREF in New York. ``You cannot do fundamental analysis and believe that those are creditworthy companies.''
Leveraged buyouts caused sales of high-risk, high-yield debt to rise 70 percent to a record $1 trillion during the first half of the year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Bonds and loans rated below BBB- by Standard & Poor's and Baa3 by Moody's Investors Service are considered below investment grade.

More securities than ever have the lowest rankings, with CCC ratings assigned to 26.5 percent of the new debt, according to New York-based Fitch Ratings. That compares with 15 percent in 2006 for debt that Fitch says has a ``high default risk.''

Traders demand 3 percentage points in extra interest to own U.S. junk bonds rather than government debt, compared with a record low of 2.41 percentage points on June 5, Merrill Lynch & Co. index data show. That's the fastest increase in spreads since April 2005, just before General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. lost their investment-grade credit ratings.