United States

Leveraged finance investors in the US and Europe have scrambled for the bonds and loans backing leveraged buyouts of Thomson Reuters’ Financial & Risk business and Dutch chemical company AkzoNobel this week, with demand driving pricing tighter despite aggressive covenant packages. David Bell and Victor Jimenez report.

American IT services firm DXC Technology made its second visit to the European corporate bond markets on Wednesday and found a good reception from investors for its debut euro issuance.

Cryptocurrencies have not had a great year. Total market capitalisation of the sector is down 75% from the highs of January, falling roughly in line with what the bears predicted. But that hasn’t seemed to slow institutions’ attempts to get involved.

US department store Neiman Marcus’s unsecured bonds and term loan have dipped in trading this week after the company said it was moving its fastest growing online business, MyTheresa, out of the reach of lenders.

Rabobank and Bank of Ireland turned to the dollar market this week to issue senior bonds meeting their minimum requirements for own funds and eligible liabilities (MREL), after both did their first deals in the new format on the same day last month.

More supranational banks will use synthetic securitization and other risk transfer techniques, specialists believe, after the African Development Bank’s trailblazing $1bn deal, revealed this week, writes Jon Hay.

NEX Group is set to pay $50m after settling with the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) over allegations that brokers in its subsidiary ICAP helped bank traders in their attempts to manipulate the USD ISDAFix benchmark.

Loomis Sayles’ senior loan portfolio manager Kevin Perry will retire in March 2019 after 17 years with the company and 37 years in the industry, the firm said on Tuesday.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Monday said it had appointed Mark Wolfe as its associate director for the Office of Derivatives Policy and Trading Practices.

Goldman Sachs has named a new head of the financial institutions group in Asia Pacific ex-Japan, and a new co-chairman for global FIG.

The African Development Bank has become the first supranational bank to use a securitization sold to private investors to free up balance sheet capacity. The deal, four years in the making, demonstrates a new technique that could expand development banks’ firepower to promote development.

The African Development Bank’s $1bn synthetic securitization is not its first risk transfer transaction, and will not be its last. The bank has marked itself out as a leader in this sphere, though the effort to get such techniques to work is also highly collaborative.