Currencies

The European Stability Mechanism has reduced its funding needs for the final quarter of 2016 by €500m, leaving it with €6bn to raise over the next three months.

The ebullient tone that characterised the first three weeks of September has faded as investors begin to fret over the US presidential election on November 8, but there is still life in the SSA market.

Showing its openness to ideas from the European continent, the UK this week followed the eurozone into corporate bond quantitative easing. The Bank of England began its long anticipated Corporate Bond Purchase Scheme on Tuesday, and already it appears to be stimulating a flurry of sterling bond issuance.

Heads turned in the investment world early in September, when BlackRock published a 15 page think piece on ‘Adapting Portfolios to Climate Change’. In fact, it could be a turning point. If the world’s largest asset manager is taking climate change seriously, other mainstream firms, especially in the US, now have little excuse for ignoring it. Ewen Cameron Watt, senior director at the BlackRock Investment Institute, spoke to Jon Hay about why all investors need to be climate-aware.

All eyes are on the renminbi this week with the currency set to officially enter the IMF’s special drawing rights (SDR) basket on Saturday. But what does that mean and why should you care? Here’s GlobalRMB’s quick guide to all you need to know.

A pair of public sector borrowers were able to sell tightly priced euro deals on Tuesday, with another two trades likely to follow on Wednesday.

McDonald’s offered a Sfr400m ($413.6m) eight year trade to the Swiss market on Monday, closing the deal with an order book exceeding Sfr1.5bn and tightening pricing by more than the lead managers had expected.

A French agency is set to bring a euro benchmark in the shortest tenor seen since the end of the summer, while a Dutch agency is about to sell its longest dated syndication ever in the currency.

A former Bank of America Merrill Lynch vice president has joined Nomura's MTN team.

The International Finance Corporation added a A$50m ($38.2m) tap to its July 2026 bond on Monday. The IFC is looking to increase its minimum volume requirements for opening 10 year Aussie taps from A$20m to A$50m.

KommuneKredit tapped its November 2026 Kangaroo bond last Friday. The 10 year part of the market suits the Danish agency, as it needs to sell longer dated paper to match its assets.

Brazilian cement company Votorantim Cimentos (VotoCim) began meeting fixed income investors on Thursday ahead of a potential bond issue that will be used to buy back one or two existing euro-denominated notes.