Barclays

The rare sight of a pulled German bond issue rocked the SSA market Wednesday afternoon. The issuer blamed market conditions but there were rumblings that this was a failure of process, not context.

The European Investment Bank and Nederlandse Waterschapsbank priced deals on a day in which another issuer pulled a trade.

The wave of Chinese acquisitions of Western companies has reached a new peak, with confirmation that state-owned ChemChina has sealed the deal to buy Syngenta, the Swiss agrichemicals and seeds business, for $43bn, as China seeks to secure its food supply.

As the euro investment grade corporate bond market approached nearly three weeks without a new issue, EasyJet broke the silence on Tuesday with its long-awaited debut bond.

Countryside Properties, the UK house and flat developer, could float between 30% and 50% of its stock in London, in an IPO that would give it a valuation of £1.125bn at mid-range.

The European Investment Bank is out with a three year dollar benchmark, which bankers away from the deal feel is aggressively priced — although its leads disagreed with that assessment.

Agence Française de Développement (AFD) and L-Bank are out with long five year euro benchmarks, as bankers reported a lack of demand at the short and long end of the curve.

Equities is proving a tough business to get right in Asia, with yet more banks forced to cut staff in recent months. Barclays and CIMB are just the latest in a long line of casualties, and as the fee pool continues to shrink, industry insiders reckon that more pain is in store for the bit players, writes John Loh.

Bankers say that five years appears to be the right point in euros in a week in which a raft of issuers hit the books.

A window for sovereign, supranational and agency issuance opened after the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting on Wednesday, with deals likely to get done before the inevitable slowdown accompanying the start of the Chinese new year on February 8.

KfW and the European Investment Bank nipped in with one-day executions on Thursday, raising €1bn apiece in what has been a turbulent week.

A trio of agencies priced deals on Wednesday after a challenging Tuesday that was impacted by a combination of worrying data from China and low oil prices.