Euroblog

VTB Capital has changed the date of its Russia Calling! conference, highlighting “mounting pressure from clients’ in-laws” as the reason for moving the event so that it doesn't clash with Thanksgiving in the US.

If the date of one major capital markets event in Russia is anything to go by, the locals have given up on attracting US investors all together.

Deutsche Bank gave a scare to some investors in its additional tier one bonds last week when it disclosed it expects to lose net €6.2bn, but Blog was very concerned when we took a look at the FCA’s Financial Services Register last week.

The covered bond market never looked so alive as it did on the beaches of Barcelona last week.

Blog made a useful discovery this week — getting stuck on a long car journey with one bank’s SSA team would be a terrible idea.

"Grexit", "Greferendum" — the slamming together of "Greece" and other semi-appropriates words has been the only consistent part of the debt talks between Greece and its creditors.

Never let it be said that such a serious organisation as the European Stability Mechanism would take an opportunity to include some cheeky subtext in one of its press releases, but Blog couldn’t help but feel that was exactly what it was doing as the clock ticked down to the make-or-break Greek referendum on Sunday.

It’s been a tough year in CEEMEA bonds, with volumes drooping lower than Putin’s man boobs.

You know when you know what someone means, but what they’ve actually said is gobbledygook?

HSBC global head of capital financing Spencer Lake lost no time ensuring his grasp on the International Capital Markets association when he was appointed its chair at the organisation’s annual general meeting last week.

The capital markets in Europe appear to be approaching something like the financial equivalent of the singularity, or the point in a black hole where time and space collapse into a single, one-dimensional point where all laws of physics fall apart.

Moody’s certainly seems to be doing its best to be left off Scotland’s list of approved rating agencies when that country issues its debut bond — something its government was granted powers to do last year.

When former Rabobank analyst Olly Burrows’ wife and one of their four children came home early to find a burglar trashing their upstairs bedroom, it was not funny.

One of the FIG world’s most extracurricularly active bankers was devastated last week when he found he was going to have to miss his annual trip to Cheltenham for the races because of work.

Who’s up for a little Russian oil/commodity play?

European Central Bank president Mario Draghi was worryingly late to the January press conference at which he announced the central bank would be embarking on full scale quantitative easing, but pictures released on an Italian website give clues as to why.

Confusion hit Blog Towers late last week after a press release arrived in our inbox about Macquarie arranging financing for LDC to buy the NEC Group from Birmingham City Council.

“What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” wrote William Shakespeare.

Christmas : every year the season comes a little bit earlier. And though an agreeable effect of this fact is that we all get to hear the WHAM! Christmas classic “Last Christmas” endlessly churned through department store speakers until the choral phrase “Last Christmas, I gave you my heart” begins to take on gruesome surgical connotations, one of the side effects is that the holiday spirit gets….well — stretched a little thin.

No nugget of information gleaned from an emerging market banker has ever been ever more unexpected.

He might be “The Boss” to an army of fawning public sector origination bankers, but Frank Czichowski, treasurer of KfW, made no secret of his admiration for Bruce Springsteen.

In the course of our crusading financial journalising, Blog receives our fair share of odd messages from sources. One this week beat them all, however. We opened an email one morning which read simply: “Virgin, I am free.”

Blog has noted with a mixture of admiration and concern the rise in popularity of extreme adventure sports among the banking community.

As the days get shorter and the commute that little bit colder, we like to hold onto the summer spirit as long as possible — ‘keep warm and carry sunglasses’ is Blog’s personal philosophy. But it seems that the Street is taking it to the next level.

International observers have been called in to deal with the fallout over alleged misconduct in the most important count of the last 12 months.

The life of a syndicate banker is fraught with early mornings and sleep deprivation, meaning weekends and holidays are a crucial time for recharging your batteries and hiding the bags under your eyes. Unless, of course, you’re blessed with the boundless energy of National Australia Bank’s Nigel Owen.

Blog thought most bankers working in the sovereign debt market would have been rejoicing as the No votes piled up when the results from the Scottish independence came in the wee small hours of Friday morning. After all, trying to explain the new constitutional setup of Scotland and the rest of the UK to overseas investors would be pretty difficult, especially considering none of the politicians seemed to know what it was supposed to look like either. Not to mention trying to work out which entity exactly would be on the hook for different parts of the UK’s debt pile.

In the Middle East, Emirates NBD has announced a unique approach to asset liability management — physically masticating its outstanding bonds. Most issuers would take the traditional approach of simply buying back their debt in the secondary market, or switching bondholders into a new transaction. Not Emirates NBD. The borrower has whipped up a flurry of interest in a controversial plan to simply eat — as in actually swallow — its dollar bonds.

You do not spend just short of two decades in two of Europe’s top debt capital markets syndicate teams if you crumble under pressure.

A shocking email for anyone planning a work jolly to Moscow landed in the Blog inbox last week, revealing: “Russian beer weakness to continue.”

Bankers are feeling the squeeze these days. So when it comes to the issue of school fees, creative thinking may be required, especially in London where competition for the best schools is keen and fees are even keener.

Sometimes Blog finds itself in the company of debt bankers with real class. Not just the kind of autodidactic epicure who knows which knife and fork to use and how to sniff around a wine list (skills which even the humble-born develop through years of client relations) but genuine old money aristocracy.

The DCM revenues of UBS surged this quarter, in part because of strong performance from the bank’s leveraged finance business. To the untrained eye, that might seem a direct result of the burst of high yield bond issuance in recent months. But Blog thinks otherwise.

Borrowers of the world form a queue, Blog accidentally discovered the world’s greatest funding official this week.

The perils of ever taking a holiday in the fast moving world of capital markets journalism were never more in evidence than this week, when a hapless Blog reporter emailed the European Union’s senior borrowing advisor Herbert Barth with a request for an interview.

As the final moments of the dramatic FIFA World Cup drew to a close on Sunday night — with Germany’s 1-0 victory against Argentina sealing their country’s place in the annals of history as the 2014 world champion — fixed income dealers across Europe were still frenetically tracking down and trading, not bonds but Panini stickers.