Pre-migration untagged articles

Dealers of private EMTNs: Non-syndicated deals for less than $250m excluding financial repackaged SPVs, GSE issuers, self-led deals and issues with a term of less than 365 days.

A different type of flight to quality in the private placement market has emerged in the last week — an increase in demand for lightly structured notes from highly-rated issuers — contrasting with the previously used safe haven of vanilla notes from the same well rated borrowers in the aftermath of Lehman Brothers’ collapse.

Royal Bank of Scotland self-placed a ¥6bn three year fixed rate note on Wednesday and a ¥19.05bn 20 year fixed rate note on Monday. The ¥6bn note pays a 1.505% coupon and the ¥19.05bn par-priced deal pays a 4.263% coupon for a spread of 215bp over mid-swaps.

The Swiss franc bond market lived up to its reputation for stability this week as Energie Beheer Nederland cut a path through a turbulent market to issue a Sfr325m ten year bond on Wednesday. Bookrunners Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS priced the issue at the guidance level of 10bp through mid-swaps, despite a 5bp drop in the Swiss franc swap rate at the close of business on Tuesday.

Fears over a possible restructuring of Greek government debt shut down the covered bond market this week and Greek and Portuguese issues widened to record spreads.

The UK Treasury has said that covered bonds are not an acceptable asset for liquidity buffers, arguing in a submission on CRD IV that the crisis has shown that they are not "resiliently liquid instruments".

Denmark’s mortgage banks, central bank and financial supervisory authority have said that new liquidity rules proposed by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and the European Commission pose a serious threat to the Danish mortgage credit system and wider economy and would destroy the country’s model of adjustable rate mortgage (ARM) lending.

The Republic of Portugal raised Eu291m from the European commercial paper market on Tuesday morning but as peripheral eurozone sovereign spreads blew out later in the day — and even before Standard & Poor’s weighed in with a two notch downgrade — dealers said that the issuer was being shunned by investors. The country’s banks will also struggle to issue CP, said dealers.

Standard & Poor’s has set a new deadline of June 16 for the full implementation of its revised covered bond rating methodology after the initial deadline — April 16 — passed with 41 of an original 98 programmes still on review.