Europe

September began with a bang for equity issuance, capped off on Wednesday by a mammoth €2.7bn share sale from Siemens Healthineers. However, the rush of deals is not just being driven by optimism. Bankers fear darker days returning.

Covered bond issuers were urged to do their toughest covered bond trades in the wake of an outstanding result on Thursday for Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, which attracted a deeper and broader range of higher quality demand for its first negative yielding structured covered bond than any of its previous deals.

Senior deals from Banco de Sabadell and Mediobanca underlined the pricing benefits of printing in green formats this week, with both coming inside conventional curves. Other issuers could be tempted to follow.

Once Schuldschein market darlings, auto parts suppliers are beginning to look to lenders like they may be in distress. Some fear a wave of credit restructurings on the horizon, when the market's lean documentation standards are likely to be tested.

In a busy week for European sovereign sustainable issuance, Municipality Finance took the chance to sell its debut social bond — the first in the format from any Nordic SSA.

Ex-Barclays banker joins Finsbury to develop equity advisory — Laubjerg hired for natural resources at HSBC — Rousseau leaves Deutsche and joins Citi

HSBC might be in the middle of a big restructuring, but that isn’t stopping plans to develop mid-market M&A efforts in France, Germany and Asia as well as the UK, writes David Rothnie. The bank has also bolstered its teams covering specific sectors.

KBC was marketing a fixed-to-floating rate note on Thursday. Strong demand allowed it to tighten pricing by 15bp during execution.

A new tier two deal from Italian lender Monte dei Paschi di Siena on Thursday showed that the market is open for trickier credits looking to sell riskier bonds. The deal emerged as the European Central Bank told Monte to raise capital to complete the sale of €8bn of non-performing exposures to Amco, the state-owned asset management company.

Greencoat UK Wind’s £350m ($467m) debt funded acquisition of a stake in two wind farms from SSE has pushed the infrastructure fund close to its leverage cap, with the fund already planning a new round of equity raises to pay down the debt.

Siemens Healthineers, the German healthcare tech company, has sold €2.73bn of new stock in the largest block trade 2020 has seen so far to partly finance its $16.4bn acquisition of US cancer care solutions firm Varian. The consensus among ECM bankers is that it will be vital to execute transactions during the next few weeks, before a tempestuous US election and possible rises in Covid-19 cases spoil the party, write Sam Kerr and Aidan Gregory.

The top investment banks will achieve substantially higher returns on equity this year, predicts analytics firm Coalition, after revenues in fixed income, currencies and commodities (FICC) soared in the first half of the year.