North America

In this round-up, the Chinese Ministry of Finance (MoF) transferred 10% of its shares in three large commercial banks to the state-owned social security fund, the Shenzhen Stock Exchange is set to welcome a new chairman and the US treasury secretary has denied rumours of inaccurate translation of the phase one trade deal.

In this round-up, Chinese vice premier Liu He will visit Washington DC next Monday until Wednesday, the State Administration of Foreign Exchange sends its deputy administrator to Guangdong and the Financial Stability and Development Committee reaffirmed the importance of small and medium-sized enterprises.

The sustainability-linked loan market is a glorious mess.

The loan market’s trade bodies are preparing to give new guidance about how to ensure sustainability-linked loans — in which borrowers can get a margin reduction if they hit sustainability targets — are genuinely “ambitious”. Bankers want to protect the market from rising concerns that some deals’ terms are too easy on the borrowers.

Mexico returned to its role of opening Latin American bond markets for the year on Monday, triggering a slew of issuance from the region as bankers predict the bulk of 2020 supply will come in the first half.

More than $30bn of dollar high grade bonds were printed in the US in the first four working days of 2020 as the year got off to a scorching start.

Yankee banks set a scorching pace for issuance in the first week of 2020 as they took advantage of red-hot funding conditions.

Kentucky-based speciality chemicals company Ashland sold a €500m eight year non-call life unsecured high yield issue on Thursday, bringing European high yield's first proper deal of the year, as part of its efforts to clean up its capital structure and switch to an unsecured financing profile.

JP Morgan has issued a $575m synthetic bond exchangeable into the American depositary receipts of Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce company.

GlobalCapital is delighted to announce the nominees for this year’s Americas Derivatives awards.

A pair of supranationals opened the Maple market with sustainability bonds this week. The Canadian green market is “going through a growth phase” as more and more domestic investors show interest in the product, according to bankers.

RBC Capital Markets is beefing up financial sponsors, aiming to boost its European business during 2020, writes David Rothnie.