Free content

Prudential rules will become more supportive for UK banks after Brexit.

Europe’s bevy of recovery lending packages is undoubtedly a welcome gesture, but it may remain just that — a gesture. If trends continue as they are, some countries may prefer market lending to concessional loans from Europe.

The secondary market in Schuldscheine is rudimentary, partly as the arranging banks have never wanted to encourage it. But a little known brokerage firm is quietly acting as a go-between, helped by its contacts with non-traditional investors, writes Silas Brown.

The theory of nominative determinism states that people tend to take jobs that fit their names: John Baker becomes a baker, Ted Milk becomes a dairy farmer, Fakey McBlowhard becomes a politician. But there are also names that are valuable, not so much because they affect your career choices but because there’s a good chance you might get confused for someone else.

One by one, banks are taking responsibility to help fight climate change, by setting targets to eliminate carbon emissions from their whole financing portfolios by 2050. This will not suffice. Banks must learn a new way of interacting with clients.

A proposed change to the Pfandbrief law introducing a soft bullet maturity is designed to harmonise Germany’s covered bond regime with the rest of Europe’s, as envisaged under the EU’s Covered Bond Directive. However, it could highlight the vast differences in how soft bullet covered bonds are repaid following extension triggers.

China wowed investors last week with a $6bn 144A bond amid a trade war with the US, but it missed a chance to solidify its credentials in the socially responsible bond market.

Japanese giant MUFG is freshening up its global capital markets business, with a couple of senior new hires. It has poached one of them from Deutsche Bank, some of whose alumni are corralling their efforts for a capital markets advisory business.

In this round-up, China's economic rebound strengthens in the third quarter, the country’s legislature passes a new law on export control to protect sensitive technology, and the law governing commercial banks faces major revisions.

This week Keeping Tabs brings you thoughts on the inadequacies of ESG data, the US election and why Spain is in such a bind.

In this round-up, China’s September inflation data disappoints, import volume beats expectations by a large margin, and Ant Group might be added to the trade blacklist by the US ahead of its jumbo IPO.

Despite the Eurozone covered bond market’s huge size, its inherent liquidity is dwarfed by much smaller sectors outside the trading block — effectively meaning ‘the market’ is slowly but surely becoming impotent.