UK

Lloyds Bank attracted stellar demand for the first Sonia-linked trade from a FIG borrower. The covered bond format was swiftly followed by a senior unsecured deal from Royal Bank of Canada. Bill Thornhill reports.

Daimler raised £500m when it reopened the sterling corporate bond market two weeks ago following the summer break — and nothing more was seen in the currency until this week, when two deals raised a combined £1.1bn.

The IPOs of Aston Martin and Funding Circle are not just two of the leading deals in the final wave of sales for 2018, but are the first UK listings to be launched under the country’s new IPO regime. Investors are happy with the extra transparency the rules have brought, writes Sam Kerr.

China’s market regulator has released the first set of proposed rules for the long-talked-about London-Shanghai Stock Connect — but whether it represents a real opening up or simply a political manoeuvre is yet to be seen. Jonathan Breen and Paolo Danese report.

BP Partners, the European private equity firm, sold out of specialist insurance Sabre last night, less than a year after the company’s IPO.

On the same day BMW reopened the euro corporate bond market following the summer break, Daimler reopened the sterling market. On Wednesday, BMW decided to follow a similar path to Daimler for its own sterling deal, but could not achieve quite the same success.

Rothesay Life, a UK life insurer, sold a restricted tier one bond on Wednesday. It took sterling issuance of the fledgling asset class above £1bn ($1.29bn).

Lloyds Bank found strong demand for the first Sonia-linked sterling transaction from a financial institution. Meanwhile the euro covered bond market ground to a standstill with just Wüstenrot Bausparkasse mandating leads for a sub-benchmark deal.

GlobalCapital announced the winners of its Sustainable and Responsible Capital Markets Awards 2018 in Amsterdam on Tuesday evening. This year’s two sovereign debut green finance issues, from Indonesia and Belgium, won Deals of the Year in their regions, and there were double laurels for Danone, in both the bond and loan markets.

The US high yield bond market’s vulnerability to the price of oil is a perfect example of how heavy dependence on a single industry can hit a whole market. Now, the sterling bond market faces a similar test from the retail sector.

UK and European IPO sellers are beginning to view Brexit as a serious geopolitical threat to the smooth running of their market and a potential hindrance on deal execution.

Barkis was willing, so David Copperfield related to us in Dickens’ famous novel. Now, it appears, Mark Carney is, too. And like the fictional stagecoach driver, Carney has been just as frustratingly enigmatic, at least to some in the markets. But his declaration on Tuesday that he was “willing” to stay on as governor of the Bank of England until 2020 should help market stability in the face of Brexit.