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Don't the bankers mislead you about the meaning of Christmas, come to the Loan Syndicate Manager’s Forum carol service and sing away the blues.

Christmas : every year the season comes a little bit earlier. And though an agreeable effect of this fact is that we all get to hear the WHAM! Christmas classic “Last Christmas” endlessly churned through department store speakers until the choral phrase “Last Christmas, I gave you my heart” begins to take on gruesome surgical connotations, one of the side effects is that the holiday spirit gets….well — stretched a little thin.

In the first instalment of our 2014 awards, we present the winners for Best Project Financing, Best Leveraged Financing, Best Investment Grade Loan and Best Loans House.

This week the ECB scaled back buying in the primary covered bond market and gave the private sector a chance to set the price.

It’s hard to find market participants that don’t think that a round of ECB sovereign bond buying is on the way. But the European Central Bank would be crazy to rush into another purchase programme without exhausting the other options.

Russian Standard Bank is hoping to take a short cut to Basel III — using a consent solicitation to add write-down language to its old tier two debt. For investors worried about getting caught on the wrong side of the vote, RSB's proposal looks aggressive. But the function of bank capital is to protect the bank, not to simply reward investors without risk.

The Hong Kong IPO market is on for a blazing end to the year, with chunky planned listings from the likes of BAIC Motor, CGN Power and Dalian Wanda. It should be a positive news story but the China bears are out in force. They aren't all wrong, but investors would do well to evaluate these deals on a case-by-case basis.

Loan Ranger’s shameless attempts to drum up some controversy last week had a bigger, more immediate and ultimately self-defeating effect than even he expected.

Forget about reindeer with shiny noses, fir trees and shopping mall carols. For those in the finance industry, the end of the year takes an altogether different meaning, writes Philippe Espinasse.

Get ready for an earth shattering revelation: liquidity in the bond market isn’t great. Whether you look at bid-offer spreads, volumes, dealer inventories or listen incredulously to war stories about how far $1m of sell orders moves the price these days (GlobalCapital’s coverage of the Petrobras scandal has a good example), the conclusion is inescapable, and sure enough, it was the top headline out of ICMA’s Secondary Market Survey.

Bonds of Brazilian corporates affected by the Petrobras corruption scandal have flunked in the last week. But prices jumping about at such speed tells us less about the credits in question than about a broader market malaise.

QBE Insurance braved it alone in the subordinated market this week as it became the second Australian financial to tap the dollar market for a tier two bond that would convert to equity or write down upon point of non-viability (PNV).