-
Oh, the perils of working for National Australia Bank when the country that lends the institution its name manages to win a game of something against England. Just ask Teddington Cricket Club clubhouse manager Nigel Owen, who also dabbles in a bit of global syndicate directing at the firm.
-
Electricité de France was set to start the green bond craze among corporate issuers with an expected benchmark deal this week. Vasakronan got there first, with a deal yesterday, and was joined by Bank of America. The green bond market has unmistakably arrived. But it will only have real economic value — and therefore value for the environment — when deals start to price tighter than the issuer’s ordinary debt.
-
How many banks does it take to sell an additional tier one deal? Only one, apparently. But that didn’t stop Barclays mandating a cast of 19 lead managers and co-leads for its AT1 debut this week. Reciprocity much? Still, there was much to admire about the deal but it does not mark this market’s coming of age.
-
Even though it wasn’t technically a bail-in, the restructuring of Co-op Bank serves as an example for how to formulate a bondholder-driven bank rescue. The only problem is that the lessons we have learned are hard ones — that forcing losses on bondholders is fraught with difficulty, and that the Co-op template can only really work for small banks.
-
Here we go again. Regulators around the world have found a new scandal to investigate the banks for. This time, allegedly, for manipulating the foreign exchange markets.
-
As any politician knows, statistics are a very useful tool for making any point you like. This must have now become apparent too to ABS and covered bond bankers who are scrutinising the European Banking Authority’s analysis of liquidity in their two markets — analysis that may have raised more questions than it answers.
-
Hordes of City workers were stranded at home on Monday as London was rocked to its very foundations by the biggest and most powerful storm the country has seen for years. In other news, life continued as normal.
-
The ABS market’s lobbyists have much to learn from their peers in the covered bond market.
-
BBVA’s radical decision to index the mortgage cover pool backing its covered bond programme to the current value of house prices sets a new transparency benchmark in Spain.
-
Morgan Stanley’s Andrew ‘Babyface’ Salvoni threw Blog into a state of confusion by revealing that he had just celebrated a ‘landmark’ birthday by going bowling with his friends.