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The coronavirus crisis has brought the role of the public sector agency into sharper focus than ever. With companies suffering devastating losses of revenues, sovereigns are doing their best to shoulder the burden and ensure companies have what they need to protect jobs. To do this, many sovereigns are leaning on their agencies as the best way to transmit economic support packages. GlobalCapital held a roundtable in mid-May to discuss the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the agency sector and how it is managing the crisis.

The corporate sector was not at the centre of the 2008-9 financial crisis — banks were. This time, it is companies of all kinds that are first in the financial markets to feel the stress of the coronavirus pandemic. Measures to control the infection have stopped many businesses’ revenues, completely and suddenly, and put others under severe strain. In such a situation, the quality of a company’s financial planning and management are revealed. Tested just as much are the financial networks that surround a company: its banking relationships and ability to finance itself in a variety of markets.

Just as it did in and after 2008-2009, the financing burden of responding to 2020’s crisis has fallen squarely on the shoulders of governments. But there are essential differences between the crises, not least the speed and scale with which sovereign issuers have had to jump into the bond markets. In the UK, within six weeks, a full year’s public borrowing requirement of £156bn had multiplied into a four months’ requirement of £225bn. To put that into context, the UK Gilt market’s previous busiest year was 2009-2010, during which it raised £227.6bn.

J. Christopher Flowers, the eminent private equity investor, sees a lot of potential for new deals in European finance in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic.

Dr Jörg Kukies, State Secretary for Financial Market Policy and European Policy at the German Federal Ministry of Finance, speaks to GlobalCapital’s Managing Editor, Toby Fildes, on Covid-19, European policy and Germany’s financial markets.

A very warm welcome to the Global Borrowers & Investors Forum 2020. This year we’re bringing the conference to you in this special publication — printed, and digitally on our website.

The Bank for International Settlements hopes that the coronavirus pandemic can aid understanding of complex global risks, encouraging public and private institutions to work more closely together to tackle the effects of climate change.

The world is facing an unprecedented crisis, the economic effects of which we are only beginning to understand. Sovereign funding will be at the heart of the effort to mitigate those effects. GlobalCapital hosted a virtual roundtable in May to discuss the effects that the pandemic is having on sovereigns’ borrowing requirements and market access, and how they are handling the situation.

Banks have been pushed to the frontline of the Covid-19 crisis in 2020, as countries around the world have locked down their economies to stem the spread of the virus.

Generals, and financial regulators, are always fighting the last war. So it proved when the coronavirus slammed into international markets in mid-March. Many of the tools developed in the 2008 financial crisis were deployed to great effect by central banks. The corners of the financial markets that propagated weakness in 2008 passed the test of 2020. But new risks were thrown up, forcing a new round of improvisation. What lessons will be drawn from the Covid-19 crisis?

Policymakers have responded with impressive speed and purpose to ensure that a global health crisis does not turn into a global financial crisis. But what happens now that their cards have been played, and is there a plan for what to do once the great lockdown is lifted?

Suddenly social bonds are the must-have financing product for public sector borrowers as they scramble to assist in the battle against Covid‑19 and its terrible human and economic costs.