Coronavirus

The New Development Bank has approved a $1bn emergency loan to India, to help the country contain the impact of the Covid-19 coronavirus.

Loans bankers and borrowers are increasingly spending weeks, if not months, negotiating over pricing, as the gap between their expectations grows wider amid Covid-19 disruptions.

The Indian equity capital market needs all the help it can get amid disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The securities regulator has already loosened some rules, but it needs to go further and relax guidelines around one of issuers’ most preferred fundraising avenues — the qualified institutional placement (QIP).

Germany's Federal Constitutional Court (BVG) touched off a legal bombshell on Tuesday morning. It left the ECB in an impossible position: it can accept the court's verdict or ignore it, but either decision will undermine its efforts to stabilise Europe's capital markets.

Since the start of the Covid-19 crisis, Finland has found a novel way to meet its increased funding needs: private placements. Over the last six weeks, the sovereign has supplemented its regular auctions with €5.65bn of privately placed trades, issuing private debt off its benchmark bond programme for the first time ever.

Instituto de Crédito Oficial (Ico) is holding a series of investor calls to introduce its updated social bond framework ahead of a transaction which will be specifically used to target the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

Direct lending funds are likely to be the best choice for sponsors looking to fund buyouts this summer, with investment banks still sitting on substantial bridge books, and simplicity and certainty of execution being the top priorities.

Germany has picked the banks that will run its first syndicated transaction since 2015 and its first 15 year bond. The sovereign will likely make its market return on Wednesday. The trade forms part of Germany's updated strategy for its colossal funding programme financing the response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Pharmaceutical company Stada announced a €200m bond on Tuesday, a "mirror" of its existing 3.5% 2024s. The new issue is rated B2 at Moody’s, making it one of the lowest rated issues to have surfaced in euro high yield since the coronavirus crisis hit, but Stada is one of the least affected issuers in the market, and said that March 2020 saw its highest ever monthly production.

Helaba and OP Corporate Bank each took a plunge into the preferred senior bond market on Tuesday, with spreads in the asset class having outperformed other bank funding products in recent weeks.

Qatar National Bank issued its third bond of the year on Tuesday, pulling in $3.5bn of orders by the time it released guidance for a five year deal that affirmed the market access for the top tier names in emerging markets.

A strong and growing deposit base, an active private placement market and sizeable proportion of prefunding has put the Pfandbrief banks in a strong liquidity position, the chief executive officer of the Association of German Pfandbrief Banks (VDP), Jens Tolckmitt, told GlobalCapital in an interview on Tuesday covering a wide range of other topics such as real estate values, the mortgage lending value and Basel III’s output floor.