United States

US issuers are tapping into favourable conditions the euro bond market after reporting their latest results. Goldman Sachs and New York Life Insurance were quick to launch senior bonds on Thursday, boosting supply volumes just as European lenders start preparing for their own reporting season.

Capital Group, one of the largest asset managers in the US, bought 13.45m shares in NMC Health on January 8, according to a disclosure on the London Stock Exchange. They were worth about £160m. That was the day after a £375m block trade by Saeed Al Qebaisi and Khaleefa Al Muhairi, two of the three controlling shareholders in the UAE health company, which faced criticism from short-seller Muddy Waters of its balance sheet and financial statements in December.

South Korea’s Mirae Asset Daewoo has been ordered to pay $700,000 after a US Commodity Futures Trading Commission investigation found one of its traders had engaged in spoofing.

China’s challenger to Starbucks, Luckin Coffee, has raised $979.6m after increasing the size of a combined sale of new shares and a convertible bond, the first tap of the ADS equity-linked market in 2020.

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.

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.