Barclays

A healthy euro benchmark pipeline is building for next week, with one supranational looking to print and a pair of sovereigns believed to be considering deals, after a week that didn’t finish as strongly as it started for core issuers.

World Bank rounded off a strong week for sterling issuance from public sector borrowers, opting to print a deal further out the curve than the week’s previous trades.

Investors on Thursday pounced on Ireland's recovery story to lap up €3bn worth of 10 year bonds from the Celtic Tiger.

EasyJet, the UK budget airline, has mandated three banks for its first ever bond issue, and will run a roadshow next week.

Allocations are out for a $145m loan backing the Blackstone Group’s acquisition of Serco’s business process outsourcing assets in India.

Korea Development Bank (KDB) snagged tight pricing for its $1.5bn dual-tranche bond, completing one of the first deals of the year in Asia. Some accounts stayed away citing expensive pricing and geopolitical concerns, but investors still thronged to the credit, viewing it as a defensive play amid high volatility.

Barclays is preparing to let go of investment banking staff in Asia as the UK lender continues to wind down its presence in non-core markets.

Bank restructurings come in two flavours — the kind where the business stays pretty much the same, and the kind where it doesn’t. 2015 was the year of the latter, as new chief executives, new business models and a pervasive sense of existential doubt hung over investment banking. Owen Sanderson reports

It’s been a tough eight years for banks — and for bankers — and the perception of finance as a career has changed in the public mind. But banks aren’t losing out in the race to hire young bright graduates, as much as the career expectations of those graduates are changing. Banks need to keep up with the times if they want to compete, writes Graham Bippart.

The European corporate bond market is preparing for another dose of quantitative easing this year and with the US Federal Reserve having finally pressed the rate button, Ross Lancaster explores what the side effects of central bank policy divergence will be.

While the last few years have been all about the European high yield bond market rapidly developing into a dependable financing source for private equity sponsors, 2015 saw the loan market fight back. But as Max Bower and Victor Jimenez point out, it has done so at a time when LBO sponsors face increasing competition from IPOs and trade buyers.

IPO, rights issue and equity-linked volume were all down in 2015, so the fact that block trades maintained their 2014 level of issuance made them the stand-out business of the year in equity capital markets. Now stocks participants are asking themselves if they can keep up the pace. Olivier Holmey reports.