Germany

The Federal State of Lower Saxony sold the first euro public sector benchmark of 2020 with a well received 10 year deal on Thursday. Meanwhile, the European Investment Bank is keeping to tradition of beginning its benchmark funding for the year in sterling.

TrailStone Group, the gas and power trader and investor based in London, has closed the year with a €150m revolving credit facility, which complies with the Green Loan Principles.

Frank Czichowski, KfW’s treasurer for more than 15 years, will be retiring in 2020. KfW has announced that it will hire the former treasurer of another German agency as his replacement.

The Swiss franc bond market has been able to withstand — just — the destructive forces of negative rates and yields and is looking forward to a new year in which green structures are set to blossom. Philip Moore reports

Specialisation could define MTNs in 2020 as the market looks to differentiate itself from public markets where borrowers are easily executing large, cheap, liquid benchmarks. MTN dealers’ change of focus is shaking up the league tables. Frank Jackman reports

The Schuldschein market is touching records for overall volume and number of deals in 2019, and in any normal year that would be what excites the market most. But instead, most pride comes from the progress made in Asia as well as innovations in sustainable financing

Volumes in European leveraged finance took a dive in 2019, leaving leveraged credit investors struggling to find value. A string of take-private attempts, especially in Germany, had lenders and banker salivating, but fell apart before coming to market

KfW has announced a smaller borrowing programme for next year, joining a number of other public sector borrowers also set to borrow less in 2020.

Analysts at Commerzbank have criticised Markit for excluding Deutsche Bank’s innovative conditional passthrough covered bond from the iBoxx index for covered bonds. They believe the decision is “technically difficult to justify” and could discourage other banks from embracing new formats.

Schuldschein salespeople, hunting for new investors with deep pockets, are targeting institutions with environmental, social and governance portfolios as the trend for green deals flourishes.

German banks have completed the first Schuldschein issue with an independent counterparty on the new Finledger blockchain platform. The entire transaction happened on a paperless basis.

BlackRock is bearish on the prospects of the government bond market in 2020, thanks to the exhaustion of monetary policy as a means of generating growth. Instead, the world’s largest asset manager is looking to move deeper into riskier assets such as emerging markets where there is still room for further easing.