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Jacques Callaghan, formerly of Macquarie Capital, has joined HSBC as head of UK mid-market M&A, concentrating on a wedge of companies that are important to the bank’s new strategy.

Some banks in the eurozone tightened their lending standards in the first quarter of 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic spread across the globe, even as loan demand surged, according to a European Central Bank survey that provides the first systematic evidence on the subject.

While emerging market bond investors are spending their days in the Covid-19 crisis battling with poor liquidity, cash calls from end investors, and even the odd new issue, debt relief has remained a threat, albeit only a vague one. But at policy level the topic is of growing importance, and what began as a matter for official institution creditors took a step closer to embroiling the private sector this week. Ross Lancaster, Phil Thornton and Oliver West report.

As European countries prepare to ease lockdown measures, those in capital markets are well aware that their day-to-day lives will not go back to how they were anytime soon. They have mixed views on working from home, but will an entirely new working culture emerge?

The European Central Bank (ECB) gave lenders even more of an incentive to use its Targeted Longer-Term Refinancing Operations (TLTRO) this week, dropping the potential rate of funding down to minus 1%. But the unveiling of a new unconditional lending scheme set tongues wagging, with market participants debating which banks might use the money and what they might put it towards, writes Tyler Davies.

Lee Buchheit is a veteran of sovereign debt restructuring and is considered by many to be a world expert in the field. He has worked on debt restructuring among many of the emerging markets countries, including Argentina, Greece and Venezuela. GlobalCapital caught up with him this week to discuss the debt crisis gripping the EM universe, and how private sector creditors should approach requests for debt standstills.

Lloyds Bank and Royal Bank of Scotland have decided not to charge clients an arranging fee when lending via the UK’s Coronavirus Large Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CLBILS), while HSBC will not charge any early repayment fees.

Deutsche Bank has regained its number one spot in its home market, but it was its traditional investment banking business that shone rather than investments made as part of the firm’s new Germany-focused strategy, writes David Rothnie.

Market participants argued that the European Commission could have gone further this week to ease leverage ratio constraints on banks during the coronavirus crisis.

Société Générale’s equities division posted a 99% year-on-year drop in revenues for the first quarter on Thursday, contributing to an overall loss in both the wholesale division and for the bank overall.

Barclays’ revenue from markets in the first quarter was its best ever, the bank said, but another large figure overshadowed this: credit provisions across the group came in at more than double the consensus estimate, on the basis of macroeconomic assumptions seen as conservative and a £300m hit from low oil prices.

In contrast to what analysts had expected before its first quarter results, Deutsche Bank reckons its investment bank will outperform last year’s revenue figures in 2020. However, its fixed income and currencies sales and trading business did not match peers’ revenue growth in the first quarter.