Europe

Two sizeable block trades priced on Tuesday evening demonstrated appetite for sell-downs after several quite weeks while companies were in earnings blackouts. Bankers expect more sales in the next few weeks as bullish equity investors line up to take on risk.

ING executed a large sterling deal this week, choosing the green format for its new senior issue from the holding company.

A sustained revival of confidence in Turkish markets has caused the lira and other metrics to improve in recent days. That, market participants said, has strengthened the country's standing in international debt markets to the point where it could consider a long dated new issue, though concerns around rising US rates are simmering away in the background.

The Association of German Pfandbrief Banks has developed a contract to ensure Pfandbrief investors’ priority claims on UK-based cover pool assets after Brexit.

Italian payments company Nexi has issued a new €1bn convertible bond to refinance its acquisition of Nets, a Danish competitor.

TP ICAP, the interdealer broker, received strong demand from its shareholders for its £315m rights issue to part-fund the acquisition of Liquidnet.

Apart from a few avant-garde programmes and players, green finance has only recently begun to be noticed in the short term debt markets, but that looks set to change rapidly. GlobalCapital spoke to Thomas Callahan, head of BlackRock’s global cash management business, about how he expects green commercial paper and ESG investing to develop.

Conor Davis is replacing Jim O'Donnell as head of investor sales and relationship management for Citi's markets business.

Oliver Ives, most recently at advisory firm Ondra Partners, has joined Deutsche Bank.

Martin Luehrs has been appointed to lead global capital markets at Morgan Stanley's Frankfurt-based broker dealer.

The size of a covered bond liquidity buffer that protects investors against the risk of payment disruption should be an important risk consideration, but there is no incentive to play safe as regulatory and central bank treatment of the asset class play more pivotal roles in valuations.

US private placement agents have struggled to attract their typical stable of well rated corporates to their market this year. Public bond markets have proven too cheap for PP funding to compete and the European wing of the market has suffered as a consequence. But instead of waiting for the scales to tip back, agents should find new European borrowers from the financial institutions sector.