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In this round-up, China’s trade surplus jumps in the first four months of the year, regulators unveil details for implementing the cross-border Wealth Management Connect pilot scheme between the Mainland, Hong Kong and Macau, and Beijing decides to suspend all activity under the China-Australia Strategic Economic Dialogue.

Green covered bonds no longer have to be reinvented in the face of rising sustainability-linked issuance because banks are now safe in the knowledge that they comply with the EU’s Taxonomy of Sustainable Activities.

The Financial Conduct Authority’s plan to look at helping US-style special purpose acquisition companies list in London smacks of short-termism. Even in the US, the epicentre of the Spac craze, there is a growing clamour for the Securities and Exchange Commission to toughen listing rules.

I was talking to a few loans bankers this week and was surprised when they revealed privately that they had very little interest in social loans. That gave me an idea.

China’s latest crackdown on some of its largest internet companies should raise a critical question — who are the real beneficiaries of reining in the country’s technology titans?

A small band of committed investors in Tesco has achieved spectacular success with a shareholder motion on healthy food. This should embolden investors to hold issuers to account on a wider range of social matters — and also contains a deeper lesson about how markets bring about change.

Ares Management has raised a colossal €11bn for its new European direct lending fund, but firms whose investments hit the skids through the pandemic may not find it quite so easy.

‘Look at the issuer as a whole’ is the mantra of the corporate and supranational green bond markets, and rightly so. But we need to apply the same approach to sovereigns.

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.