Covered Bonds

The Cover will in January run league tables ranking banks and law firms according to the volume and number of new covered bond programmes that they have arranged or advised on this year. While Dealogic will be providing much of the necessary data, we would like to invite market participants to submit information on the programmes they have helped set up this year.

Investor appetite for covered bonds sold so far at Danish mortgage banks’ December auctions is as healthy as it has been in previous years, according to market participants, putting to rest fears that difficult market conditions would deter investors from participating in the auctions.

Rating action: Standard & Poor’s today (Tuesday) placed WestLB’s A- rating on CreditWatch with negative implications, but gave the all clear on other Landesbank ratings following reports that these banks’ owners are prepared to provide them with support.

Rating action: Fitch on Friday placed the long term issuer default ratings of three Irish covered bond issuers on Rating Watch Negative.

Data includes jumbo issues in euros and $1bn minimum issues in dollars; excludes retained deals under Dealogic criteria.

Rating action: Moody’s on Friday placed on review for possible downgrade the Aaa rating of Caja de Burgos’s cédulas hipotecarias.

Rating news: The Swedish Covered Bond Corp must take certain remedy actions set out in the documentation of its covered bond programme to mitigate the downgrade of its parent’s ratings by Standard & Poor’s last Wednesday, the agency said today (Monday).

The Cover will from today (Monday) be expanding its coverage of government guaranteed senior unsecured debt and related agency issuance, in which many of you will also be involved as an issuer, intermediary or investor. We will, of course, continue to follow developments in all aspects of the covered bond market, but given the lack of new issuance in the asset class we hope that you find this addition to our coverage useful.