Europe

The dollar bond market has been thoroughly supportive of this week’s SSA borrowers, but none more so than Sweden, which pulled in its biggest order book ever for its first deal of 2018.

A thinly oversubscribed €1bn 10 year covered bond issued this week by Compagnie de Financement Foncier could mark the beginning of the end of the bull run in covered bonds. Bill Thornhill reports.

The sterling market had a healthy opening week in the public sector with three deals raising a combined £1.9bn, and there is plenty more in the pipeline, according to syndicate bankers.

Rating: Baa1/A+/A-

Siberian Coal Energy Co (Suek) and Russian Copper Co are expected to sign pre-export finance facilities after launching their deals before the end of 2017.

The largest and darkest clouds that hung over Europe's banks appear to have all but cleared in time for the new year.

Among the many miseries perpetrated by MiFID, there’s one aspect which has particularly caught this newspaper’s eye: the disclosure of the fees paid to banks for new bond issues.

The sterling covered bond market enjoyed a strong start to the year, with four issuers raising a collective £3.7bn. Barclays priced the first deal of the year, which also happened to be one of the longest and largest.

International banks are expecting competition in the Russian loan market to heat up even further than it did over the course of last year, regardless of the onset of further sanctions from the US. Bianca Boorer reports.

Crédit Agricole Cariparma took advantage of the exceptionally tight spread environment to issue the first 20 year Obbligazioni Bancarie Garantite (OBG) on Thursday and completed the final leg of its 2018 funding requirement at a record spread through BTPs.

The Republic of Slovenia brought forward a euro-denominated trade by as much as a week in order to take advantage of a strong issuance window, which enabled it to increase the size of its deal by €500m to €1.5bn, according to Marjan Divjak, director general of Slovenia’s debt management office.

Emerging market borrowers will front-load their funding tasks in 2018, according to several EM bankers who are predicting a busy month.