Banks again are doling out money to hedge funds and other investors to finance purchases of complex debt securities, returning to a practice that helped fuel the debt boom ahead of the financial crisis.

RBC Capital Markets, Société Générale ., BNP Paribas and Wells Fargo are among the banks offering to let investors borrow money, also known as providing leverage, to buy collateralized loan obligations, say investors and bankers. CLOs are bonds typically backed by pools of low-rated corporate loans.

Borrowing programs for such esoteric securities have been only selectively available in the years since the crisis. While banks have lent to a handful of investors, the practice picked up late last year when funding costs began to fall….

Finding new buyers would help them offload the debt, while keeping prices relatively high. Some banks also are trying to ensure there will be demand for more CLOs they help create.

Banks “are resorting to creating economic incentives to get primarily hedge funds to step into this void,” said Oliver Wriedt, senior managing director at CIFC Asset Management LLC, which manages CLOs….

Hedge funds “have finally come to grips with leverage and begun to embrace it” for CLOs, said Jean de Lavalette, head of securitized products sales at Société Générale.

But with leverage comes risk. Even a small drop in the market could force investors to pledge more cash and other collateral to offset the securities’ decline. Losses are magnified when borrowed money is used….

…..GoldenTree Asset Management recently purchased CLOs using leverage. Joe Naggar, a partner at GoldenTree in New York, said using leverage makes sense because prices on highly rated CLOs have fallen, increasing their yield relative to other debt securities. Borrowing money to buy could bolster returns if prices rebound…..

Banks have offered to lend some investors as much as $9 for every dollar that the buyers invest in CLOs, say traders and strategists. Others are being offered $8 for every $2.

An investor in a triple-A-rated CLO earning 1.50 percentage point over the London interbank offered rate—using 10% of his or her own money and paying 0.80 percentage point over Libor for the financing—could earn about 8% in a year. That compares with annual interest rates near 2% on a standard triple-A CLO.

Citigroup researchers in a mid-April note to clients predicted that the new source of financing could help drive up prices of triple-A-rated CLOs.

That could be a boon to a market that has stumbled under the threat of new rules on what banks can hold on their books. CLO prices tumbled, and the creation of new CLOs slowed earlier this year as the market digested the rules that will ban banks from investing in certain CLOs.

Since then, CLO prices have begun to recover, and CLO issuance has picked up after a slow start to the year. More than $35 billion of CLOs were created so far in 2014, the most for that period since 2007, when $36.4 billion were created, according to S&P Capital IQ Leveraged Commentary & Data….

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