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Saudi Aramco’s IPO last year was a historic event for the company and its owner, Saudi Arabia, but despite a record $29.4bn being raised at IPO, international investors stayed away. They had demanded that the shares offered a discount to other listed oil majors, in part because of the political risk associated with the company. The fact it is now a tool in Saudi Arabia’s oil price war with Russia will have vindicated many in their decision to sit out the deal.

Canadian banks are among the largest, most profitable and best rated in the world, but that does not grant them immunity from liquidity bottlenecks. A recent spree of deals — although in some ways a show of might — illustrated that even the most fortified of lenders can appear vulnerable.

Standard Chartered’s announcement that it was allocating $1bn to help companies deal with coronavirus, or transition towards making essential medical kit, makes a virtue of doing what most banks are up to anyway. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of good news in these troubled times, but Stan Chart’s competition might feel they’ve missed a trick.

New Development Bank, the Shanghai-based multilateral development bank, is planning to sell a Rmb5bn ($704m) Panda bond that will be used to provide an emergency loan to China.

In this round-up, China is ramping up measures to stimulate the economy including by issuing special treasury bonds, the central bank resumed open market operations and lowered the seven-day reverse repo rate, and the foreign exchange regulator has released some key data points.

GlobalCapital may not have been able to celebrate its Equity Capital Markets Awards in person with the winners this year but we are no less delighted to be able to reveal who they are and those winners are no less deserving for it. We fully intend that the dinner will return next year but for the meantime, here are some of the highlights from this year’s crop. Our congratulations to all.

GlobalCapital is pleased to reveal the winners and nominees of its 2019 Equity Capital Markets Awards.

In this round-up, Chinese industrial profits recorded the steepest drop in a decade, US president Donald Trump praised China’s understanding of Covid-19 and Hong Kong bourse’s Charles Li said closing the market is not the solution to stem sell-offs.

HSBC entered Europe’s top three in the equity-linked league tables in 2019, capping a multi-year rise with a series of firsts and eye-catching deals.

In this round-up, China will block foreigners from entering the country starting Saturday, residents of Hubei are allowed to leave the province after two months of being under lockdown and the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission is setting up a holding company to manage state-owned asset management companies.

For years, the best sovereign issuers in the emerging markets would boast that their latest bond deal showed how much the mystical “international financial community” supported the current administration’s macroeconomic management. And EM investors would pretend that buying the stuff was to have the map to Treasure Island.

‘Corona bonds’ have been talked up so much that the EU risks underwhelming the market by failing to act. It has become a question of political solidarity within the region, not simply one of debt management.