Germany

Volkswagen used the slipstream of the upbeat corporate bond market this week to print the largest corporate hybrid bond deal of the year to date. The dual tranche offering garnered €8bn of demand.

Deutsche Hypo this week priced an eight year Pfandbrief at the widest level of any benchmark sized German covered bond this year, suggesting investor sensitivity is particularly pronounced in this part of the curve when the spread to mid-swaps is negative.

KfW has hired a new head of government relations with a strong background in climate change and energy issues.

Bayer, the German pharmaceuticals giant, has completed its jumbo €6bn rights issue with 98.3% of shareholders taking up their rights.

Bayer’s €5bn four-tranche corporate bond offering on Tuesday not only cleared the way for other issuers to approach the market, but the €22.5bn of demand gave four issuers the confidence to sell a variety of deals in Europe on Wednesday. €3.5bn was issued in the euro market and £1bn in sterling.

German pharmaceutical company Bayer delivered on its plans to raise more than €20bn in senior bonds with an eight tranche dollar deal on Monday and a four tranche euro transaction on Tuesday. The dollar deal was three times oversubscribed and the euro deal nearly 4.5 times.

LBBW’s debut green Pfandbrief attracted a larger order book from a wider set of international investors compared with a vanilla deal, suggesting the bonds have good scope to perform relative to ordinary deals.

Legal & General has announced a £325m buy-in to Heathrow’s pension scheme, while simultaneously lending £160m to the London airport company through a private placement note.

LBBW has mandated leads for its first Pfandbrief secured on green mortgages. The transaction follows a similar deal last week from DNB Boligkreditt and comes after LBBW’s inaugural green senior deal launched in December 2017. Several other covered bonds are expected next week.

It is a mark of how far the market has come from a barren week at the end of May that not just one, but three deals, totalling €2.75bn, were priced on Friday. The European Central Bank meeting and the expectation of a deal from German pharmaceuticals company Bayer played their part in the issuers’ decisions on timing and the order books justified those choices.

Guarantor: Federal Republic of Germany

The week began with that rarest of things in recent times, a welcoming political backdrop. It was marred, however, by monetary policy meetings from the two most important central banks in the world. While the US Federal Reserve’s second rate hike of the year was a foregone conclusion, it caused the dollar curve to flatten still further, making the euro market even more fertile funding territory than it has been for SSAs. But even so, euros had its own struggles this week, facing what one head of SSA syndicate called “one of the most important and unpredictable European Central Bank meetings for a long time”. Lewis McLellan reports.