Americas

Alpek, the petrochemicals business of Mexican conglomerate Grupo Alfa, sold a $500m 10 year bond on Wednesday at the tight end of expectations to become the latest in a line of Mexican issuers to tap the primary market in September.

Brazilian oil giant Petrobras is looking to push out bond maturities and reduce its debt stock with an exchange and tender offer, as companies from the country take advantage of strong market conditions to reprofile their liabilities.

The breakneck speed of dollar corporate bond issuance continued this week, with lower rated investment grade borrowers dominating investors' attention as they came to the market to lock in attractive financing rates amid fears the credit rally may run out of steam.

Moody’s slashed Ford’s rating from Baa3 to Ba1 on Monday, placing the company in precarious crossover territory, with S&P and Fitch holding the firm at BBB with negative outlook. Other falling angels may land in the junkyard soon as the triple-B sector has ballooned to record levels.

How much emphasis do you put on a tweet? According to JP Morgan and its recent ‘Volfefe Index’, 280 characters is all US president Donald Trump needs to shock the markets. The aim is to create an index “to measure the impact of the president’s tweets on rates volatility”. However, with algorithmic trading and tweet aggregation commonplace, many market participants are unconvinced that the index brings anything new to the table.

Bank of Montreal and Rothesay Life made use of the quieter political situation in the UK this week to issue in sterling, in the same week issuance paced down in the euro market ahead of the European Central Bank’s meeting.

Mexican oil company Pemex is set to “defend its ratings” with an imminent new issue, bond exchange and buy-back to be partially funded by a capital injection from the government.

Alpek, the petrochemicals business of Mexican conglomerate Grupo Alfa, sold a $500m 10 year bond on Wednesday at the tight end of expectations to become the latest in a line of Mexican issuers to tap the primary market in September.

Mexican state-owned oil giant Pemex emphatically showed it has access to capital markets on Thursday as it received more than $35bn of orders on the way to a $7.5bn trade that could grow as existing bondholders participate in an exchange.

The same capital controls that have brought some calm to Argentine bond markets could lead to the exclusion of certain government notes from some JP Morgan indices, said the US bank on Tuesday.

Bank of Montreal was marketing a senior preferred bond in sterling on Tuesday, one day after Rothesay Life gave FIG investors a chance to put their money in tier two in the same currency. The Canadian issuer started its trade with a 15bp-20bp concession, according to a banker off the deal.

Moody’s slashed Ford’s rating from Baa3 to Ba1 on Monday, placing the company in precarious crossover territory, as the other agencies have the firm on negative outlook. Other falling angels may land in the junkyard soon.