The Wire — Livingstone’s Debt Advisory Perspective

You down with OCC? Yeah you know me.

If you plan on tapping the commercial bank market in 2015, here’s something to bear in mind that the Office of the Controller of the Currency’s (“OCC”) leveraged lending guidelines will undoubtedly effect how receptive commercial banks will be to your leveraged deal. What is interesting is the fact that the OCC originally came out with their Interagency Guidance on Leveraged Lending back in March of 2013.

The OCC states that HLTs with over 6x leverage will garner increased scrutiny.

However, as we have experienced, it wasn’t until the second half of 2014 that commercial banks started to scrutinize highly leveraged transactions (“HLT’s”).

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