Americas

Berkshire Hathaway was one of five issuers to brave choppy conditions on Thursday and open the dollar market with the first trades of 2019.

Latin American bond markets had a predictably quiet start to 2019 as DCM bankers are focussing firmly on next week for any new supply, but early signs suggested that Brazil would continue to be the outperformer.

The Options Clearing Corp (OCC) had a big year in 2018, with cleared options volumes beating record levels set in 2011.

New bitcoin futures engineered by Bakkt, a cryptocurrency firm set up by Intercontinental Exchange, will be delayed, according to a market notice released by ICE on New Year’s Eve.

Futu Holdings, parent of Hong Kong-based Futu Securities International, is planning a Nasdaq IPO of up to $300m.

El Salvador’s Congress has approved the issuance of new external debt to enable it to refinance debt due later this year. That will mean one fewer headache for whoever wins next month’s presidential elections.

The global high yield bond market has produced $320bn of new issues in 2018, up to December 21, 43% down on last year’s total of $563bn, according to Dealogic. Sentiment has turned progressively more bearish as the year has worn on, with concerns about US-China trade hostility and overvaluation of US equities biting.

Mexico’s new president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (Amlo) is free to proceed with his proposed cancellation of Mexico City’s new airport after bondholders agreed to waive clauses that would have triggered an event of default.

An appetite for risk is returning to Latin America's equity markets heading into 2019 as worries over the China-US trade war and rates hikes in the latter country ease, according to a Lat Am fund manager survey from Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Research.

In this round-up, Chinese president Xi Jinping’s speech at the celebration of China’s reform and opening up offered no concrete promises, the People’s Bank of China reopened the seven-day reverse repo after 36 days of suspension, and China dropped its holding of US government bonds for the fifth consecutive month.

2019 is likely to be another year where the independent mandate of central bankers comes under pressure from populist politicians in democracies. It is easy for those in the market to sympathise with the quiet technocrats over the loud-mouthed headbangers, but scrutiny is deserved.

Battling a host of problems — local and global — Latin American bond markets suffered a torrid 2018. Many issuers stayed away, high yielders struggled to find financing and investors booked losses. With more volatility expected, political developments in LatAm’s three largest economies could make or break the region’s bond markets in 2019. Oliver West reports.