Americas

China's Ebang International Holdings, a cryptocurrency mining hardware maker, is planning a US IPO that could raise up to $100m. It follows in the footsteps of Canaan Creative, which listed last November but has since seen its stock price tumble about 53%.

Debt capital markets bankers had been hoping for at least two years that Colombian oil company Ecopetrol could be persuaded to issue a bond. When the government-owned borrower finally opted to tap bond markets last week for the first time since 2016, it caught the eye by doing so with oil prices at historic lows, in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic and, unusually for a Lat Am issuer, on a Friday.

After years of being in the shade of their high yield colleagues, equity-linked bankers are emerging from the Covid-19 global pandemic as some of the biggest fee earners in the capital markets amid an issuance boom, particularly in the US, as embattled corporates scramble to raise liquidity.

Swedbank was paying less than fair value for a new euro senior deal on Friday, according to market participants, with the bank raising funding a day after publishing its first quarter results.

In this round-up, international investors dumped Rmb208.4bn ($29.4bn) of Chinese stocks in March, and state-owned enterprises recorded a huge revenue drop in the first quarter of the year.

International capital markets are facing a reprise of one of their most eerily familiar tales in the next month: the will-they-won’t-they tension of the run-up to an Argentina default, writes Oliver West.

Paraguay continued the relative rush of Latin American issuance on Thursday with a heavily demanded $1bn 11 year bond becoming the second high yield sovereign from Latin America in two days to tap bond markets to fund Covid-19 mitigation.

Mexico proved its capital market prowess with a highly oversubscribed $6bn bond this week, despite facing a wave of downgrades, concerns about the contingent liability represented by Pemex, and investor fears that the government is reacting too slowly to the Covid-19 pandemic.

April is set to be the second busiest month ever in the US corporate bond market (after March), as companies pile up funding to build up their financial resilience to Covid-19, despite continuing volatility and waves of bad news.

Debt investors are distinguishing between strong and weak risks in the oil and gas sector, as huge oversupply threatens to weigh on oil prices, already at multi-decade lows — and for the time being, market participants also expect that worries about energy won't tarnish the whole high yield market.

A trio of Wall Street heavyweights tapped the dollar market in size this week, with investors pouring cash into new deals.

New ECM head at UniCredit — NIB treasurer heads to SEB — Mills takes up newly created position at UBS