Pilar Gomez-Bravo knows a thing or two about financial crises. She’d been a credit insider in one guise or another at Lehman Brothers for about a decade when the last one hit.
Today she’s a portfolio manager at MFS Investment Management, and sees eerie similarities between the current frenzy for risk and the speculative mania that made her cautious on the eve of the last bubble.
She’s selling junk bonds in a contrarian bet that the debt rally is on its last legs -- with the potential to trap funds with billions staked in levered and often illiquid assets.
“There’s an art to knowing when to leave the party,” said the director of fixed income for Europe in an interview. “In fact it’s over -- people are desperate and they’re hunting down the after-party. We probably only have a few hours left.”
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