Americas

Toronto-Dominion Bank smoothly executed the sixth seven year euro covered bond this week despite a Bloomberg blackout delaying the process. The larger than usual €1.25bn deal offered a decent new issue premium and attracted comfortably oversubscribed book.

National Bank of Canada (NBC) priced the first 144a three year dollar benchmark since July 2013 on Monday. The lack of comparable deals meant there was an element of discovery in pricing, which was almost excessively defensive. BayernLB was set to price a three year Reg S public sector dollar benchmark.

National Bank of Canada is on track to sell a $750m three year covered bond, its first covered bond in dollars since 2011.

Toronto Dominion issued the ninth sterling denominated covered bond of the year on Wednesday, and the third from a Canadian bank in the three year floating format. The transaction provided better executable funding than it could have achieved in dollars or euros. The issuer followed Bank of Nova Scotia, which on Tuesday priced the third Canadian dollar benchmark of the year, funding more cheaply than was possible in euros.

A pickup in primary market activity continued apace on Wednesday when Stadshypotek sold the sixth dollar denominated covered bond in the US this year.

LatAm delegates who struggled with the 40-hour journey to get the IADB meetings in Busan are likely to return with harsh lessons on trade tariffs rather than a recipe to replicate South Korea’s economic miracle.

Chinese officials in Beijing are growing increasingly unhappy with the government’s policy of offering cheap loans without conditions to troubled Latin American states that might never be able to repay them.

Slowing growth, inflation, and an increasingly fractious relationship with the United States are making China “increasingly wary” of investing in Argentina, analysts have told Emerging Markets.

Bilateral trade deals with Latin America have mushroomed in recent years but there is a growing desire to join two regional trade agreements that could link the continent into the economic powerhouses of South East Asia

The slowdown in economic growth in China is starting to have real impacts on commodity-rich Latin America as weakening demand for construction crimps demand for raw materials

Policymakers in Latin America have been braced for tighter US monetary policy for a couple of years, which has allowed them to cope with the impact of higher borrowing costs. One fly in the ointment for corporate borrowers could be a rise in the dollar against EM currencies.

Emerging Markets can reveal that North Korea was rebuffed by Beijing in its attempt to join the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank because it was unable to hand over a proper snapshot of the hermit state’s economy and finances