Euro

The African Development Bank’s (AfDB) funding team will be “heroes” if the issuer’s debut euro benchmark is a success this Friday, said SSA bankers away from the deal.

The African Development Bank’s funding team will be “heroes” if the issuer’s debut euro benchmark is a success on Friday, said SSA bankers away from the deal.

CK Hutchison raised $1.25bn and another €1bn ($1.12bn) on Wednesday, whetting investors’ appetite with a good marketing strategy and wise timing, according to bankers.

Agence France Trésor tapped into strong pent-up demand to draw a bumper book and print its largest inflation linked benchmark since the 2008 financial crisis — despite offering just a few basis points of new issue premium.

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.

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.

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.

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.