Coronavirus

The funding team of the European Stability Mechanism has launched its first physical roadshow to meet investors in person for 18 months, making the supranational agency one of the first, if not the first, to officially revive the concept since the Covid-19 crisis began.

Wells Fargo has informed staff in the US that it is delaying the reopening of its offices in the country as a result of rising Covid-19 cases.

As capital markets bankers gradually start to spend more time back in the office, a nuanced debate is playing out over how much flexibility they can expect to enjoy with regard to remote working when pandemic restrictions are finally lifted.

NatWest Group recorded a loss at its investment bank on Thursday, after climbing down from the dizzying heights of last year’s first quarter profits. The weaker numbers weighed on the performance of the group, but the bank still managed to breeze past market expectations.

Kenneth Lay, chair of the International Finance Facility for Immunisation (IFFIm), is no stranger to using financial innovation to help tackle some of the world's biggest problems. He spoke to GlobalCapital about the importance of IFFIm as a vehicle to finance the global vaccine rollout in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic.

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) will need to see more evidence that its capital reforms restrict “buffer usability” and have “(pro)cyclical” impacts before it recommends any changes to the framework.

One big crisis should be enough for anyone's career. But Sir Robert Stheeman, chief executive of the UK's Debt Management Office, has had to face two monumental financial catastrophes in the last 13 years — first the 2008 UK banking crisis and then last year's pandemic.

The Restaurant Group, the owner of numerous UK dining brands including Wagamama and Frankie & Benny’s, launched a £175m equity raising on Wednesday to see it through to the end of the UK’s Covid-19 lockdown.

The World Bank and the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) have partnered up for a new privately placed deal to front-load funding to the agency — the first time the World Bank has partnered with a UN agency in this way.

Pablo de Ramón-Laca is director general of the treasury and financial policy at Spain's Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation. That places him in charge of the world's ninth largest sovereign debt stock, according to S&P data, for a country pummelled by the Covid-19 pandemic. Spain has the second highest number of cases in the EU and the seventh highest in the world. But even that is not the full story of the pandemic's impact.

The thinking that the additional tier one (AT1) market should go back to trading through its pre-pandemic valuations holds big risks.

Two factors bear outsized influence on capital markets — Covid-19 and central bank stimulus. But the temptation to see these powerful forces culminating in one of two extreme outcomes — another crash as a feeble economy flounders, or a boom like the 1920s US — must be resisted.