Europe

Increased hostility towards Russia from the UK political establishment is severing the financial links between the two countries. The arguments between Russia and the West are freezing the former’s equity capital markets, which depend on UK and US investors, and is, according to some sources, driving Russians to repatriate capital. In the long-run, it could even be detrimental to the UK’s capital markets industry, write Sam Kerr and Francesca Young.

Equity derivatives strategists are keeping their cool and see no need to switch strategies after the European Central Bank on Thursday held rates and declared December as the month quantitative easing would end.

The return to health of the investment grade corporate bond market has been a path carefully trodden one step at a time. French electrical components manufacturer Schneider printed a successful nine year new issue on Wednesday, following corporate deals with eight and seven year tenors on the previous days of the week, but the lack of other supply surprised some bankers.

The Amsterdam IPO of electronic payments company Adyen has been acclaimed as one of the best European IPOs in over a decade after the stock rose 91% on its first day of trading.

Two issuers from the CEEMEA region — Bulgarian Energy Holding and Ecobank Transnational Inc — have mandated banks for new bonds and are embarking on roadshows, breaking the wait-and-see mode that the market had slipped into over the last week.

The European Central Bank announced on Thursday that it will bring its €2.5tr asset purchase programme to an end in December. However, the assertion that hikes to its deposit rate would not come before September 2019 lent the proceedings a dovish note.

In the political sphere, Europe and North America appear to be travelling in separate directions since the election of Donald Trump as US president in November 2016, as was evident at the recent G7 talks.

The European Central Bank surprised some corporate bond market participants on Thursday by setting out how it expects monetary policy to evolve over the next year and a half.

KommuneKredit will hit the road next week to talk up a new green bond, while a fellow Nordic issuer is looking to enter the social bond market — although not for some time yet.

The Paris IPO of Delachaux Group, the French maker of railway equipment, has been called off after CVC agreed to sell its stake in the company to Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ) for an undisclosed price.

Credit Suisse found itself long of stock in Neste Corp, the Finnish oil refiner, after an €861m sale of shares by the Finnish government on Tuesday night. The failed block trade has prompted equity capital markets bankers to ask whether the market has become much more unforgiving this year, writes Aidan Gregory.

Six months into the life of MiFID II, a new regulation that had many in the capital markets sweating over just how onerous their lives were about to become, some public sector borrowers have claimed that not only has the implementation of the regulation been simple, but in several ways it has been beneficial. That is not the universal view, however, with some borrowers still experiencing minor headaches.