Orange and black is the new black swan

A blip in Bloomberg's terminal services this week delayed bookbuilding on a number of syndications and bond auctions. It passed with seemingly little harm done. But it did reveal how dependent bond issuance and fixed income has become on the company's platform.

We asked what would be at stake if there was a longer outage and what can be done to prevent major disruption.

Meanwhile, rising US Treasury yields mean SSA bonds are trading at ever smaller spreads over them. It wasn't that long ago that issuers questioned the wisdom of trying to price bonds at a single-digit spread to the US benchmark. This week a German issuer built its biggest every orderbook in the currency with a bond that came at 7bp over — it then tightened to 3.5bp over.

Now the SSA market is wondering if or when an issuer will price through what is supposed to be the world's rick-free benchmark security. We lay out the cases for and against.

Finally, we ask whether the European corporate bond market is running out of steam after one jumbo deal too many, and we also take a look at the bustling market for the riskiest part of a bank's capital stack: additional tier one paper.