Free content

The Pfandbrief market is in the middle of a tumultuous year which includes not only the adoption of the EU's Covered Bond Directive but also digesting the bloc's Taxonomy for Sustainable Activities. Of course, this is all happening against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic and lockdowns, which have hit the commercial real estate market that underpins much of the product. Jens Tolckmitt, chief executive of the Association of German Pfandbriefbanks (vdp), spoke to GlobalCapital about how the market has coped.

In this round-up, China’s macro leverage drops on a year-on-year basis for two consecutive quarters, Ping An Insurance Group plans to invest up to Rmb50.75bn ($7.84bn) in troubled conglomerate Peking University Founder Group, and the securities regulator has put more weight on the pre-listing education process of domestic IPO candidates.

GlobalCapital is pleased to announce the shortlist of nominees for its 2021 Global Derivatives Awards.

“What gets measured gets managed,” goes an old saw popular in sustainable finance circles. If companies, investors and banks, the argument says, collect better environmental and social data, this knowledge will naturally breed improvements in performance.

There are plenty of reasons to be cheerful about first quarter bank results, but it’s too early to be excited.

The social confines of the past year have made me forget the importance of behaving myself in front of strangers.

Senator Marco Rubio is the latest Republican in the US to launch an attack on what conservative voices have recently dubbed “woke capital,” apparently putting the GOP at odds with an investment world that has embraced ESG.

There is a golden opportunity for banks to set a precedent by issuing sustainability-linked bonds across the capital stack, rather than waiting for regulators to finish fretting over the guidance.

As its debt-to-GDP ratio inflates and its public finances come under pressure, some have wondered if Tunisia will succumb to a debt restructuring process. But the governor of the Central Bank of Tunisia, Marouane El Abassi, told GlobalCapital that the country is intent on securing new IMF funding as a prerequisite to entering capital markets.

Neoen, the French renewable energy company, completed a €600m rights issue at the start of April to help fund it until 2025. Its CFO, Louis-Mathieu Perrin, spoke to GlobalCapital about the deal and explained how green equity stories can still win investors’ attention, despite a recent cooling off in stock valuations.

In this round-up, Beijing decides to leave ‘clean coal’ out of the latest list of eligible projects for green bonds, stock exchanges in Shanghai and Shenzhen plan to tighten approval for bond issuance, and the first batch of public infrastructure real estate investment trusts (Reits) are being reviewed at the two bourses.

Credit Suisse had a great first quarter, if you ignore one or two little hiccups. The firm enjoyed a big uptick in investment banking revenues but senior management is fighting fires lit by the double disasters of Greensill Capital and Archegos Capital.