Europe

This week in Keeping Tabs: the former governor of the Bank of England on value and values, The New Republic on law and value, reminiscing about the last crisis, and a pub snack en vogue.

This week's scorecard looks at the progress Nordic agencies have made in their 2020 funding programmes in mid-December, with some issuers also setting their targets for 2021.

Ukraine, which has proven itself a favourite of emerging market investors this year, has slipped into international markets for a small dollar tap before year-end. The trade comes amid strained negotiations between Ukraine and the IMF over the disbursement of emergency funding.

Fugro, the Dutch geo-data specialist, has completed its €197m rights issue, a key proponent in a large refinancing package that resolves longstanding issues around debt maturity.

The strong run of green equity capital markets deals in Europe continued on Thursday night with a €224m sale of stock in Spanish infrastructure and renewable energy company Acciona.

The European Banking Authority has updated the market on how it thinks Basel IV will impact bank capital requirements, setting the scene for another paper next week examining how the rules could interact with the economic shock of the coronavirus pandemic.

With returns on developed market bonds being squeezed as never before, debt analysts are heralding emerging markets as the place for investors to be in 2021. Yet the faster the global economic recovery, the more vulnerable EM fixed income will be to what has often been its downfall: any signal of tighter global liquidity conditions, write Mariam Meskin and Oliver West.

At the end of a strong year, Deutsche Bank told investors that its investment bank had not simply benefitted from a rising tide lifting all boats, but that it would be able to carry on generating much of the extra revenue it created in 2020. It also boasted of working on a number of European sovereign debt deals.

Not content with the central bank purchase programmes of seemingly infinite elasticity, some Italian officials have recently floated the possibility of the ECB forgiving the debt it has purchased. This is illegal, and changing the law is not what Europe needs at the moment.

Berenberg is developing into a pan-European mid-market powerhouse, with big growth ambitions for 2021, writes David Rothnie.

The European Central Bank failed to provide the “big bazooka” that some capital market participants were hoping for at its meeting on Thursday. But the central bank did show its willingness to continue financing bank lending until the economy starts to recover, suggesting that FIG supply volumes face another difficult year in 2021.

Hungary and Poland will not veto the EU’s budget, ending the threat to the bloc’s €750bn coronavirus recovery fund, after the parties agreed to a compromise at Thursday’s European Summit.