Banks

CLSA has made two senior appointments to its fixed income and debt capital markets teams in Asia Pacific.

More supranational banks will use synthetic securitization and other risk transfer techniques, specialists believe, after the African Development Bank’s trailblazing $1bn deal, revealed this week, writes Jon Hay.

An anonymous letter criticising HSBC’s global banking division exposes its history of underperformance in M&A. But that was never a priority for the bank, which should be more worried about a broader rebuild after the Matthew Westerman era, writes David Rothnie.

The State of North Rhine-Westphalia won strong demand on Wednesday for its longest ever trade, allowing it to print a size almost double its target.

Credit Suisse has for decades called first place in Swiss franc bonds its own. But as the fourth quarter approaches, arch-rival UBS is defending a potentially insurmountable lead over its sparring partner, thanks largely to its success bringing Canadian and Korean borrowers to the market this year.

Dollar investors gave public sector issuers something to think about on Wednesday, as a pair of SRI bonds had very different receptions. One aggressively priced deal struggled to reach full subscription while another offering some concession grew by a half. World Bank is up next in the currency, though in conventional format, and bankers believe the trade will indicate the market’s direction.

Sulzer, the Swiss maker of industrial machinery, has made a Sfr15m ($15.5m) profit on a block of shares it acquired in April from its former majority owner, Renova Group, to escape economic sanctions imposed on Russian companies and individuals by the US Treasury’s OFAC.

NatWest Markets attracted €4bn of demand for a short-dated floating rate bond on Wednesday. Bankers on and off the deal disagreed about the size of new issue premium offered.

Toyota may be a familiar name in the corporate bond markets, but Toyota Motor Finance Netherlands BV stepped out of the shadow of some of its parent company’s better known subsidiaries to issue its first benchmark bond in a major currency.

The National Bank of Oman hit screens on Tuesday, raising $500m of five year paper in a market still hungry for more Middle Eastern supply.

The Islamic Development Bank’s five year sukuk trade appears to be meeting with a warm response, allowing the leads to pull in the spread by several basis points.

According to a report by asset manager BlackRock, global exchange traded products saw a consistent inflow into fixed income funds in the first eight months of 2018. Within fixed income products, investment grade corporate bonds saw equally consistent flows, while high yield corporate bonds saw two consecutive months of inflows after six months of outflows. The inflows extend to high yield markets too, which is doing nothing to aid the fight against looser covenants.