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It’d be nice to imagine that veterinary services are recession-proof. Worming tablets and hairball treatments seem like they should be non-discretionary purchases. The $60bn-plus of private equity cash flowing into petcare over the past decade was premised on the hope that demand would be price-inelastic.

The facts appear to be somewhat different. Per Morgan Stanley:

A Morgan Stanley/AlphaWise survey of 75 US vet practices showed first-quarter patient volumes dropping 1.9 per cent in the first quarter, the worst reading since the series began in mid-2021.

Vet practice revenue showed its first decline on record, down 0.5 per cent, the survey showed, with more than three-quarters of vets saying that customers have been arguing about prices. They reported declines in new patient appointments, existing patient check-ups, diagnostic testing and discretionary procedure volumes.

Because it captures fewer struggling independents left behind by corporate consolidators, Morgan Stanley’s vet survey usually offers a more sunny view than the wider industry. Private-equity backed firms are estimated to control about half the US market share. But since the average life of the patient is not much more than a decade, there’s a constant need to attract new customers. Any practice with a small catchment area will tend to be in decline.

Data from Vetsource covering more than 5,000 US practices shows vets hiking prices over the past few years as visits drop from post-pandemic highs:

It’s price inflation that makes the data hard to untangle. US prices for veterinary services have jumped roughly 60 per cent in the past decade, as MainFT reported in January:

Critics of [private equity’s] “roll up” strategy say the price rises stem from reduced competition in what was once a “mom and pop” business. The industry counters that bill inflation is more the result of advances in animal healthcare and of owners expecting ever more sophisticated treatments for their increasingly pampered pets.

That trend appears to be accelerating. Ninety-two per cent of respondents to Morgan Stanley’s survey said they had raised prices over the previous 12 months, with nearly a fifth of respondents saying they had raised prices by 9 per cent or more.

Asked to guess why visits were down, price inflation was the vets’ second-most popular answer after the macroeconomy. Also notable is the tick higher in respondees blaming a reduction in pet ownership:

And, tellingly, slightly more than half of vet practices said they were still managing to eke out revenue growth year-on-year.

Morgan Stanley’s survey finds that of all vet services offered, acute care was the only category from which revenues continued to tick higher. A decline in preventive treatment probably helped that trend.

If pushback on vet bill inflation continues to strengthen and the US economic outlook continues to weaken, that’s probably not good for the life expectancies of Milo and Luna.

However, some PE firms are already positioned to benefit from pet owners’ difficult decisions. BC Partners bolted a crematorium operator to its VetPartners business in 2021, for example, and Imperial Capital-owned Gateway Services has been rolling up competitors in what it euphemistically calls “pet aftercare”.

Animal funerals are not cheap: UK operator Dignity Pet Crematorium quotes £70 before casket, urn and transport costs for cremating a goldfish, £130 for a chicken and up to £300 for a dog. Whether demand is more or less recession-proof than worming tablets and hairball treatments remains to be seen.

Further reading:
— Is private equity behind the surging cost of veterinary care? (FT)
— Vets IPO likely to test the market’s animal spirits (FT)

In spring 2022, as junior investment bankers across the industry rebelled against punishing workweeks, Citigroup unveiled what seemed a progressive, forward-thinking initiative: a gleaming outpost on Spain’s Costa del Sol offering work-life balance for up-and-coming dealmakers Sun, sea, spreadsheets. What a brilliant idea!

Well, the dream is gone, as MainFT reported last Thursday:

Citigroup is closing its beachside Málaga office less than three years after opening the hub to offer junior investment bankers a better work-life balance. 

The US lender has told staff that it will close the unit in the southern Spanish city, cutting a handful of jobs and relocating other employees to London and Paris, the bank confirmed in a statement to the Financial Times. 

Citi opened the office in 2022 at the height of a post-pandemic battle for talent in the financial services industry, and at a time when banks were facing criticism for failing to prevent staff burnout.

The Wall Street bank had hoped to set itself apart from its competitors by offering junior staff eight-hour days and work-free weekends on the Costa del Sol — a far cry from the punishing seven-day working weeks typically demanded of young investment bankers in New York and London. 

However, Citi said on Wednesday that it was closing the office as part of its strategy to “simplify the firm and make improvements to how we operate”.

When the Málaga venture was announced in 2022, Citi’s senior investment banking leadership insisted that this was “not a gimmick”. Yet even then, most bankers — especially the Spanish ones in London and Madrid — ridiculed it as an expensive PR exercise fuelled more by sangria than strategic alignment. It was the kind of initiative that industry professionals don’t take seriously.

While it is easy to scoff at the idea, there was a commendable logic behind it. Málaga provided Citi access to a steady pipeline of talented graduates from less prominent business schools — candidates who might otherwise be overlooked by top-tier firms. Graduates from elite institutions typically have more options and often choose higher-ranked competitors over Citi. By opening a satellite office outside traditional financial hubs, Citi positioned itself to attract capable, ambitious students from local and regional schools that firms like Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley seldom approach. Málaga also offered practical advantages — notably, lower operating costs and strong transport links to Madrid and broader Europe. The lifestyle benefits were also expected to be a significant draw.

For almost three decades, Citi has strived to close the gap between itself and the top tier of investment banks. Despite exceptional rainmakers on its roster, the bank continues to trail industry leaders in marquee investment banking products. Rather than repeatedly emulating Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley, it makes strategic sense to try something different. 

So why, just three years later, is the Málaga experiment being shut down and erased from Citi’s global footprint? 

Of course, a high-profile initiative such as this was bound to generate internal tensions, and both office politics and the financial pressures of the current downturn likely played a role in its demise. But at a deeper level, the venture may have been doomed from the start, because in this industry, geography is more than just a backdrop. Where you are based shapes your access, your visibility, and your proximity to decision makers. It determines whom you run into, what deals cross your desk, and how often you’re invited into the room where the real conversations happen. 

From the very beginning, the Málaga hub struggled with a perception problem. And in investment banking, perception matters — a lot. Internally, despite the rhetoric around work-life balance, the culture still celebrates hard work and visible hustle. Externally, clients are often uneasy with the idea of their bankers enjoying a relaxed, beachside lifestyle. Perhaps if Citi had chosen a less sun-soaked, more conventional location, the optics might have been more favourable.

The reality also diverged from the pitch. The Málaga hub promised less grind and more sunshine, but in practice, it delivered professional isolation and irrelevance. With few clients in the region and even fewer senior leaders present, the office became a satellite outpost of junior bankers logging 70-90 hours per week — for roughly half the pay of their peers in Madrid or London.

The bespoke and relationship-driven nature of investment banking would have made it especially difficult to delegate strategic or high-value work to a remote team. While grunt work is unavoidably a big part of the job, no front-office banker wants to feel like outsourced resource — akin to an offshore team tasked overnight with running comps or basic research. Unsurprisingly, many in Málaga requested transfers to core dealmaking centres. When those opportunities failed to materialise, morale reportedly plummeted.

Citi had tried to market a lifestyle but missed a more fundamental industry truth: people don’t enter investment banking for wellness, but for growth. This is especially true for driven young professionals hailing from non-elite institutions. Long hours are expected, even embraced, so long as they lead to development opportunities, mentorship and marketable experience. Málaga likely offered little of that: no managing directors to champion careers, no impromptu interactions with clients, no in-person visibility with senior leadership.

The Málaga gambit also reflected a misunderstanding of about how investment banks operate. Hedge fund managers can work from far-flung locations because performance is measured in returns, not presence. But banking runs on trust, nuance, face time (not FaceTime), and relationship capital. A managing director might pass through Málaga on occasion or find it a useful temporary base en route to a weekend in Sotogrande. But overall, if you’re away from the action, you end up subsisting on the scraps that no one else wants.

This is not to suggest that a remote future for investment banking is impossible. Across Europe and North America, there are corporate finance boutiques that operate lean, remote models — partners choosing lifestyle over location, juniors logging in from anywhere, and the occasional rented space in Mayfair to maintain appearances. This set-up can work, up to a point. But even then, it does not scale beyond a handful of professionals and a limited number of deals each year. It’s certainly not viable for a global institution like Citi, where centralisation, compliance, and co-ordination are core to the operating model. Despite the argot of agility, major investment banks remain, at their core, command-and-control enterprises.

The episode also reflects a broader shift in workplace dynamics within finance. In the 2020-2021 deal frenzy, junior bankers had bargaining power. They demanded and received concessions. But with the slowdown in deal flow and the return of lay-offs to the agenda, the pendulum has swung back, as it always does. Perks are being pulled. The old rules and norms are reasserting themselves. The Empire is striking back.

Ultimately, Málaga never aligned with the operational realities of large investment banks. The idea was interesting and unconventional — but likely too radical to steer a supertanker like Citigroup in a new direction. 

It’s not just stocks or rates. Corporate debt markets have also been “yippy” lately. And one corner to keep an eye on are exchange traded funds that invest in collateralised loan obligations.

CLO ETFs have exploded in popularity over the past couple of years, with aggregate assets across the handful of funds surging to $30bn — about 13 times the $2.3bn they held at the end of 2022 — as investors lapped up their punchy yields. About half of it has gone into Janus Henderson’s JAAA ETF alone, which invests in the top-notch triple-A rated slices of CLOs.

However, a few cracks are starting to appear in the market, after investors pulled a record $1.8bn from the funds in the week to Thursday, according to Morningstar data. As Todd Rosenbluth at TMX VettaFi points out, its part of a broad retrenchment:

We have seen anything that is not Treasuries in fixed income fall out of favour with investors, whether it is taking on credit risk through high-yield bonds, senior loans or CLOs. Investors are just hunkering down. JAAA has been one of the hottest ETFs in the past year and a half, but it’s inevitable that people pull back their exposure when the environment shifts.

But CLO ETFs are particularly interesting. Let’s back up a bit to explain why Alphaville is so curious about how these funds are faring.

CLOs are constructed out of floating-rate corporate loans, often to private equity-backed companies, typically with non-investment grade BB or B credit ratings. The loans are then bundled up into pools of debt, and then securitised.

This allows the CLO manager to slice the pools into tranches with varying degrees of risk, which can then be sold to investors. Through the magic of securitisation and over-collateralisation, most of these junky loans can be transformed into a triple-A rated security perfect for risk-averse but yield-hungry pension plans or insurers.

More recently, they’ve become a big hit with retail investors, thanks to the Federal Reserve’s rate increases since 2022 juicing the returns of their floating-rate loans.

It’s no secret why the air has now come out of CLO ETFs. Although no AAA-rated CLO — the tranche favoured by most ETFs — has ever defaulted since their introduction in 1997, fears over defaults make anything with a whiff of credit risk look dicier. Moreover, growing expectations of Fed rate cuts damp the attraction of floating-rate debt.

Matthew Bartolini, head of SPDR Americas research at State Street Global Advisors, points out that investors had also been overweight credit coming into the crisis and valuations were “priced for perfection”, rendering them vulnerable to any wobble.

They are credit instruments. While they may be, in some respects, high up in the capital structure given their securitised nature, there’s still a credit component and what we are seeing is a sell-off in credit assets,

The wave of selling of CLOs by ETFs has exacerbated the difficulties some private equity groups are facing in finding buyers for their debt, with bond sales to finance buyouts made by companies backed by Apollo and Patient Square Capital grinding to a halt.

But for Alphaville, the more relevant issue is how they perform in a choppier environment. These CLO ETFs weren’t around for the big fat March 2020 stress test, and there have long been questions about how they’d fare in a similar crisis.

Even junk bond ETFs invest in fairly actively-traded public securities. CLO tranches and CLO loans, on the other hand, are essentially private credit, making both cash and in-kind redemptions a bit tricky. In Europe regulators have been particularly circumspect, only allowing the first European CLO ETF to list in September.

And lo, the wave of selling has led some funds to trade at chunky discounts to the value of their underlying assets — something that the ETF arbitrage mechanism is supposed to prevent.

Average discounts to net asset value topped 1 per cent at the start of the sell-off, from a premium of 0.04 per cent a day earlier, Morningstar data show, with the $94mn VanEck AA-BB CLO ETF falling to a discount of 4.4 per cent and the $139bn Eldridge AAA CLO ETF one of 3.7 per cent.

But this wasn’t just an issue for the smaller CLO ETFs. Even JAAA, by far the biggest, traded at a discount of 1.1 per cent as investors pulled a record $1.3bn from it.

This is despite actual investment losses being relatively muted at this stage. JAAA’s share price is down 1.3 per cent this month, the Eldridge ETF 0.8 per cent and the VanEck vehicle 2.3 per cent (although losses have been larger for some lower credit quality funds, with an Eldridge ETF targeting BBB to B-rated debt losing 3.1 per cent). Discounts have since narrowed but remain wider than normal.

However, rather than this signifying a problem with the ETFs themselves, some — eg, FTAV’s Robin — believe the blowout in discounts is more a reflection of the underlying security prices being stale and out of date, a phenomenon seen in the wider corporate bond market in March 2020 at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“The underlying bonds inside an ETF are not priced real time, whereas the ETF is, so during times of market uncertainty you might see discounts to NAV,” says Rosenbluth.

ETFs give real-time price transparency. It takes time for the bond market to catch up. If you don’t need to trade, don’t trade during times of market volatility because there will be discounts during market sell-offs.

Perhaps. But it will be interesting to see how these CLO ETFs hold up if the turbulence in credit markets escalates further.

Further reading:

— ETFs are eating the bond market (FTAV)

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The Prudential Regulation Authority doesn’t do clickbait, so you’d be forgiven for skipping a rulebook update from the UK banks regulator based on this headline alone:

Modification by consent of the Liquidity Coverage Ratio part of the PRA Rulebook — Third Country Covered Bonds

It’s now a dead link, but if you’d clicked through yesterday you’d have been served a paragraph of legalese about how the modification allows “a firm that has incorrectly applied a rule regarding third country covered bonds’ inclusion in Level 2A High Quality Liquid Assets (HQLA) of the Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR), to recognise these bonds on a limited and declining basis.” The change took effect immediately, on April 8.

What does it mean? The subject – bank liquidity buffers – is important enough to warrant clarity. The asset class, covered bonds, is widely held. The phrase “incorrectly applied a rule” suggests a mechanism for any firm that counts the wrong thing towards its buffer to correct the mistake.

Where it gets confusing is the rule. People told us the change was a retrospective action by the regulator to erase a rule that had been impossible for any firm to apply correctly.

We asked the PRA. A person familiar with its workings agreed with the above reading, telling us that its rule on covered bonds was invalid because it has never tested the quality of those bonds. Soon after, the person told us to ignore that guidance and promised an update that never came. Repeated requests to the regulator over several days provided no more clarity.

This morning, the PRA posted an update saying it had pulled the change:

The PRA has received a number of technical comments and requests for clarification. As a result, the PRA has decided to pause the process and withdraw the modification, in order to consider and address the points raised appropriately. Once that process is complete, the PRA will clarify its approach.

In the interim, the PRA considers firms do not need to amend their approach to recognising third country covered bonds under the Liquidity Coverage Ratio (CRR) and Liquidity (CRR) Parts of the PRA Rulebook

Here’s how things worked before April 8.

Banks must hold enough high-quality liquid assets to cover net cash outflows over 30 days of severe stress. Most of the buffer has to be made of cash, central bank reserves, certain sovereign-backed securities, or “extremely high quality covered bonds”, which are called Level One assets. Lower-quality covered bonds go alongside riskier stuff in Level Two, which is split into A and B, like this:

The PRA had previously said it would count covered bonds issued by third countries as Level 2A assets. They had to be regulated to at least the UK standard, the cover pool should exceed the amount required to meet claims, and bondholders had to have priority if the issuer defaulted.

But according to a person briefed on the change, the PRA had never taken a view on which of the lower quality non-UK covered bonds were equivalent to UK ones, meaning none could count towards Level 2A.

To keep things orderly, the original plan was to allow firms to roll off non-UK covered bond holdings bought before the end of January. These would be counted towards liquidity buffers under the old rules, though their value is capped and they can’t be replaced like-for-like on sale, maturity or redemption. In effect, holdings should roll off gradually towards zero.

The more disruptive effect was to push big buyers out of a small market. Per the below chart from SocGen, sterling-denominated covered bonds are a niche relative to the total . . . 

. . . and tend to be bought by UK investors . . . 

. . . but are only sometimes issued by UK institutions:

By changing the rule, the PRA would shrink the available investor base for sterling covered bonds, giving firms in Canada and Australia little incentive to continue issuance. Liquidity would suffer.

“While this would improve demand for sterling-denominated assets and/or gilts in the UK, it would also concentrate UK sovereign risks across UK bank treasuries and local investors,” said SocGen analyst Anamika Misra in a note published last week. She compared the PRA’s change to favour UK issuers with Trump-like protectionism.

Sterling covered bond pricing over the past week appears to have baked in some of that uncertainty. But perhaps the most surprising thing was the timing.

The European Commission is due to deliver its own report by July on how to approach third-country equivalence when calculating buffer size, with legislation expected to follow next year. With the EC widely expected to take a more collegiate approach, the PRA’s now-reversed move put it on a collision course with Europe, as Misra wrote last week:

Fair treatment in exchange for fair treatment? Well, in an ideal world, we would expect this. If Europe opens its door to third-country equivalence, we would expect the equivalent countries to treat its covered bonds on a par with their domestic covered bonds. The UK seems to disagree with this ideology. The EU is a big market for covered bonds, and we believe it will not incorporate policies like the UK. We believe it will stick to its policy of including covered bonds issued by EEA or non-EEA G10 countries

Can the PRA get its revised guidance out before the EC report lands? Or will the suggestions of UK protectionism continue to hang over talks? Either way, it’s a wholly unnecessary mess.

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Sid Venkataramakrishnan is a digital sociologist and former Financial Times reporter.

Much ink has been spilt and many keys pressed to figure out whether AI is a bubble. Just last month, OpenAI’s ersatz Ghibli took X by storm. A “big net win for society”, as head honcho Sam Altman described it, and for the “democratisation of creating content” which Hayao Miyazaki and other dastardly animators spent so long gatekeeping.

One hint that we might just be stuck in a hype cycle is the proliferation of what you might call “second-order slop” or “slopaganda”: a tidal wave of newsletters and X threads expressing awe at every press release and product announcement to hoover up some of that sweet, sweet advertising cash.

That AI companies are actively patronising and fanning a cottage economy of self-described educators and influencers to bring in new customers suggests the emperor has no clothes (and six fingers).

There are an awful lot of AI newsletters out there, but the two which kept appearing in my X ads were Superhuman AI run by Zain Kahn, and Rowan Cheung’s The Rundown. Both claim to have more than a million subscribers — an impressive figure, given the FT as of February had 1.6mn subscribers across its newsletters.

If you actually read the AI newsletters, it becomes harder to see why anyone’s staying signed up. They offer a simulacrum of tech reporting, with deeper insights or scepticism stripped out and replaced with techno-euphoria. Often they resemble the kind of press release summaries ChatGPT could have written.

Corporate needs you to find the differences between these two images

Yet AI companies apparently see enough upside to put money into these endeavours. In a 2023 interview, Zayn claimed that advertising spots on Superhuman pull in “six figures a month”. It currently costs $1,899 for a 150-character write-up as a featured tool in the newsletter. 

The Rundown hasn’t discussed its revenue breakdown. But if you want evidence of Big Tech’s favour, look no further than Cheung’s 35-minute interview with Mark Zuckerberg from 2024. It’s impressively Rogan-esque in its refusal to pose anything approaching a tough question.

Kahn and Cheung did not respond to requests for comment. 

When I asked his view on the AI newsletter economy, Ed Zitron — writer, PR man and scourge of slop — was characteristically excoriating.

“It’s content built for people who don’t really read or listen or know stuff . . . It’s propaganda under a different name,” he said. Zitron also expressed doubts about seven-figure subscriber counts, saying that it’s easy enough to juice metrics by buying a list of email addresses.

It’s not just a noted critic of the “AI eats the world” train who’s less than impressed. 

“These are basically content slop on the internet and adding very little upside on content value,” a data scientist at one of the Magnificent Seven told me. “It’s a new version of the Indian ‘news’ regurgitation portals which have gamified the SEO and SEM [search engine optimisation and marketing] playbook.”

But newsletters are only the cream of the crop of slopaganda. X now teems with AI influencers willing to promote AI products for minimal sums (the lowest pricing I got was $40 a retweet). Most appear to be from Bangladesh or India, with a smattering of accounts claiming to be based in Australia or Europe. In apparent contravention of X’s paid partnerships policy, none disclose when they’re getting paid to promote content. 

High follower counts are similarly suspicious. In at least some cases, it’s the same people operating multiple accounts: a landing page for a smaller newsletter, 80/20 AI, mentions three X profiles with different names promoting the same content, in violation of the platform’s guidelines on authentic content.

When I asked 80/20’s founder Alamin Hossain, he responded “Can I know, why do you ask?” then went silent. X did not respond to a request for comment on whether these accounts broke its rules.

And yet AI firms seem more than happy to pay for unethical spam to sell their product. APOB AI, one of a million generic image generators, has a whole Google Doc of suggested posts to copy in multiple languages and across different platforms. 

“I made an AI Instagram influencer in just 60 seconds. Now it’s generating $5,000+ a month,” reads a recommended tweet on X. 

Except they didn’t make anything: the accompanying images of two women are taken from elsewhere. The post has received more than 420,000 views since last October.

“That was created with AI,” the account told me when I asked him about the theft. When presented with evidence, he then claimed that he had not generated them but simply took them from two other accounts. A reverse image search shows that yet another AI page used the same photos.

In its own way, slopaganda exposes that the AI’s emblem is not the Shoggoth but the Ouroboros. It’s a circle of AI firms, VCs backing those firms, talking shops made up of employees of those firms, and the long tail is the hangers-on, content creators, newsletter writers and ‘marketing experts’ willing to say anything for cash.

“When these people pop up around an industry, it should be a sign that this is a worrisome bubble or that there are people actively looking to exploit it,” said Zitron.

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Here are some interesting lines from Apollo’s chartmeister Torsten Sløk, showing the spread between the bids and the asks for off-the-run and more liquid investment-grade corporate bonds (high-res link):

We knew that credit markets were belatedly reacting to the tariff shenanigans — as MainFT reported earlier today, the junk bond market has been completely frozen — but off-the-run liquidity in investment grade debt being as bad as it was in March 2020 is pretty staggering.

For people unfamiliar with the vernacular, “off-the-run” is what older, staler bonds are called. Bonds are typically as their most heavily traded when they are freshly issued — “on-the-run” — but over time they tend to settle down in long-term portfolios inside pension plans and insurers and whatnot.

That means that they are always less “liquid”, and banks offer sloppier prices. So while you might be able to buy $100mn of a newly issued IBM bond for $100.05 or sell it for $99.95mn, if you need to trade an old, stale one the prices might be something more like $100.1mn or $99.9mn.

In the chart above, Apollo has categorised liquid corporate bonds as those with a nominal value of at least $1bn that have been issued in the past year, while its definition of off-the-run are bonds issued more than two years ago and for less than $900mn (these make up about half the investment-grade corporate bond market).

We have some questions though. First of all, as bad as the recent newsflow has been, it’s hardly Covid-19 bad. But of all, it’s intriguing that bid-ask spreads for liquid bonds have only widened a little bit, and remain tighter than they were at the peak of the 2023 banking collapses. Why? Here’s Sløk’s non-answer.

The gap between liquid and illiquid bonds is particularly noteworthy. In 2020, the bid-ask spread widened across the whole market. But this time around, transaction costs have increased materially more for off-the-run paper. This highlights the growing liquidity divide in the public IG market. Liquidity in on-the-run bonds has improved, but off-the-run paper has become virtually untradeable and effectively a buy-and-hold investment.

But why? Why have liquid bond quotes stayed so remarkably tight compared to off-the-runs? In 2023 they actually ballooned more. We get why credit trading volumes have hit new records, but was everyone just trying to ditch off-the-runs and eventually making them “untradeable”, as Sløk puts it?

We’ll do some digging, but if you have a theory then please post it in the comments.

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It’s Friday Thursday, Friday Thursday, gotta name charts on Friday Thursday.

About two thousand years ago a semi-successful execution took place, and as a result you have two extra days to figure out the identities of the charts below.

If you believe you have succeeded, to send your answers to [email protected] with the subject ‘Quiz’ — letting us know if you wish to remain anonymous — before noon UK time on Tuesday.

Get them right, and you could win a T-shirt.

Good luck, and Happy Easter to those who celebrate. Also, if you like quizzing reminder that tickets are on sale for our next London pub quiz, on 15 May.