Euro

Gazprom this week sold its first euro denominated bond of the year, a €750m seven year, with a new issue premium that a lead manager has estimated at only 0bp-2bp.

There are 15 minutes to go, your team is a goal ahead. The manager has the classic dilemma of throwing on another striker (or three if he is Kevin Keegan) to try and get a second goal to put the result beyond doubt, or replacing his flair player with another defender and trying to hold on to the lead.

Bank of China's Paris branch raised almost $1.5bn across three currencies and tranches on Wednesday, marking the fifth offshore green bond from China this year. Concord New Energy had contrasting success and pulled out of a planned deal.

China Jianyin Investment (JIC), an equity investment group, launched a euro-dollar combo transaction on Thursday morning, its first international debt offering.

Cores, Spain’s strategic oil reserves manager, has returned to capital markets for the first time in two years, defying Spain's political turmoil to raise €400m while slashing 7bp from its initial spread.

Greece has fired the starting gun on its latest debt rehabilitation effort, after launching a roughly €30bn exchange offer for 20 bonds it issued as part of its restructuring in 2012.

Single digit new issue premiums had survived the secondary market weakness in corporate bonds of the last few days, but on Wednesday Vodafone had to pay up as it sold a three tranche deal significantly wide of where its existing bonds were trading.

Russian state owned giant Gazprom released initial price thoughts for a euro seven year bond on Wednesday morning at a level that bankers away from the deal said was around 20bp back of the company’s curve.

Two green issuers from China are wooing buy-side accounts for new bonds, with Concord New Energy Group and Bank of China collecting investor orders from Wednesday morning.

Three issuers launched social bonds on the same day on Tuesday, which is likely a first for the SSA market. They raised a combined €1.5bn across five, seven and 10 years, with two of the deals managing to make dramatic moves in pricing thanks to what one banker called "superb conditions".

If there was a measured pace to corporate bond issuance on Monday, on Tuesday it roared back to the frenetic pace seen the week before. A triple tranche dual currency deal by BT was the largest deal of the day, but the other trades offered a lot of variety for investors.

The last time British Telecommunications sold sterling bonds, the global financial crisis was still beyond the horizon. It returned on Tuesday after more than 10 years only issuing in euros and dollars, but investors were not as welcoming as the issuer may have expected.