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After months of lockdown in countries across the world, a few of my banker friends are now slowly heading back to their offices. It is not easy.

Real money investors have historically avoided the reputational risk involved in participating in sovereign debt restructurings. But a truly socially responsible investor should embrace these situations — for the sake of both their clients and troubled emerging nations.

Some argue that innovation has taken a backward step in the pandemic with the loss of people working in close proximity bouncing ideas off each other. But that’s not the case in the capital markets. In fact, working remotely in such a vast but archaic business has brought the use of technology to the centre of discussions.

Anne Stevenson-Yang is a director and co-founder of J Capital Research, a New York firm and short seller that specialises in Chinese companies, as well as international companies looking to grow their business in China. GlobalCapital spoke to Stevenson-Yang about the dangers of trusting financial reporting from China, and steps stock exchanges could take to stifle the likelihood of fraud.

The convertible bond market has played a vital role during the Covid-19 global pandemic in funding corporates that were in urgent need of liquidity as the crisis took hold. Deals have performed for investors too, although they should be concerned about the potential for rising defaults.

US president Donald Trump’s sudden targeting of Tencent Holdings and its flagship app WeChat last week was vague in the extreme. But what is clear is the Trump administration’s increasing willingness to go after China’s tech darlings. That should not be ignored.

GlobalCapital and Standard Chartered hosted a virtual roundtable on the China high yield debt market at the end of July as the second part of a 2020 roundtable series. The first was conducted in mid-April. The market has seen drastic changes in the months since. We gathered together a group of leading high yield bond experts to find out how they have dealt with those changes.

In this round-up, the US once again threatens to delist Chinese companies from American stock exchanges, the Treasury department imposes sanctions on 11 government officials in Hong Kong, including the chief executive of the special administrative region, and TikTok suggests it could to go court to fight a recent executive order by president Donald Trump.

This week in Keeping Tabs: confronting dollar bears, Lebanon’s crisis, the power of debt in Ireland, and funding equity research.

In this round up, China records a trade surplus in July that exceeds expectations by a large margin, the central bank reviews the monetary policy from the second quarter and sets a direction for the rest of the year, and the finance minister says more than half of the proceeds from China’s Rmb1tr Covid-19 themed ‘special treasury bonds’ are already in use.

In this round-up, China and the US will examine the progress made from the phase one trade deal, the Chinese foreign minister says a ‘new Cold War’ is not what Beijing wants, and a pair of executive orders by president Donald Trump will ban US transactions involving WeChat and TikTok’s parent companies.

The coronavirus crisis is a further reminder that fundamentals are not the only thing that matters when investing in bank capital.