French Sovereign

Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan have launched this evening a block trade in Altice, the French telecoms investment group that has grabbed headlines this year for its takeover of French mobile phone company SFR – and which is now in a takeover battle for Portugal Telecom.

The covered bond market has started to lose some of the energy and excitement that followed the announcement of the European Central Bank’s purchase programme. This week, BPCE issued a finely tuned deal that was sized precisely to demand.

Total on Wednesday priced a €1bn floating rate note and an €850m fixed rate bond, just a day after it issued a six year sterling deal.

French oil company Total priced a £300m six year bond on Tuesday, paying a small new issue premium, according to bankers. The deal follows a spate of recent deals in the currency from Walgreen, Ford and Intu Properties.

Faurecia, the French car parts manufacturer, has refinanced a €1.15bn undrawn loan facility, hiring 10 banks.

Alliance Automotive, the French-UK car parts distributor, is set to issue €325m of high yield bonds to refinance its acquisition by Blackstone and the company's founders from Weinberg Capital Partners in August.

China's State Administration of Foreign Exchange (Safe) added Rmb11.1bn ($1.8bn) to its RMB qualified foreign institutional investors (RQFII) programme in October. In Europe, Investec, BNP Paribas Investment Partners (BNPP IP) and the Carmignac Group took home individual RQFII quotas to start investing in China’s capital markets.

Europe’s corporate bond market is throbbing with deals, and bankers are dismissing the capital markets turmoil of a fortnight ago as a blip that was barely noticed in investment grade credit.

The European Central Bank's covered bond purchase programme (CBPP3) turned relative value upside down this week, with a French deal pricing inside a similar Swedish offering, among a crop of four new issues.

Higher costs and provisions around retail business in Ukraine and Italy as well as litigation has meant that analyst predictions for Credit Agricole’s third quarter results have proved too optimistic. But the French bank’s profits rose 25.8% from the same period last year to €967m, while it is up 2% for the first nine months of its financial year with profits of €2.4bn.

The planned offshore renminbi clearing house in Paris will mark the first step towards the establishment of a broad offshore RMB ecosystem independent of central banks and reminiscent of the Eurodollar market, according to Peng Wei, deputy general manager of Bank of China Paris branch (BoC Paris), the firm that is at the heart of preparations for the launch of the system next year.

Natixis posted solid third quarter results on Wednesday, with a 21% rise in net income, partly driven by bigger asset management revenues, but its capital markets business dropped sharply year on year.