Harrah’s Debt Gamble
- Harrah's
- Entertainment
- Debt Payoff
About a year ago, investors were so convinced that Harrah’s Entertainment would file for bankruptcy protection that the company’s bonds, traded for 10 cents on the dollar. Since then, the world’s largest gaming company has surprised naysayers by carving out a foothold of three years during which it can afford to make interest payments on its debt.
The hope is that by 2013, its earnings will be high again. They will need to be because that year a $6 billion debt payment will be due. Another $9 billion in debt, by analysts’ estimates, comes due between 2015 and 2019. The 2008 leveraged buyout that took Harrah’s private doubled its debt.
Although most of Harrah’s employees can only hope for the best while they are occupied with serving customers in a sorry economy, the job of whittling down more than $20 billion in debt has fallen to Chief Financial Officer Jonathan Halkyard, a 45-year-old Harvard MBA who has overseen a complex refinancing scheme some observers have called “a college course in credit.” Click the link to read more of this article at the Las Vegas Sun.