The GlobalCapital Podcast

Send us Fan Mail Investors bored with sustainability targets How green was my allocation? Bookrunners won’t tell you Can emerging market borrowers keep up the comeback? There’s a clash brewing in the sustainability-linked bond market with investors losing interest in issuers’ KPI targets. We ask why these important sustainability targets are missing the mark and what the consequences are for the S...

Send us Fan Mail What’s up with ECM? European politicians suddenly love securitization again Adani versus Hindenburg Research and what it means for Adani’s banks The equity capital markets were supposed to have been alive with deals this January — bond markets certainly have been — but very little has happened. We investigate who is to blame and when we might see some action. Meanwhile, European p...

Send us Fan Mail Mighty Earth vs JBS: how sustainable is the SLB market? How the FIG and corporate bond markets are changing this year What can put a stop to record bond issuance The sustainability-linked bond market is a nascent one but booming. It is a controversial one too, with some accusing it of being a platform for greenwashing. Those accusations escalated this week when Mighty Earth, an NG...

Send us Fan Mail Sergiy Nikolaychuk of Ukraine’s central bank offers an in-depth look at the country’s economy in wartime Can the good times last in the primary bond market? Real estate looks for refi rehab and direct lenders end up as owners Sergiy Nikolaychuk is the deputy governor of the National Bank of Ukraine, the country’s central bank. Appointed to the job in 2021, he has been at the heart...

Send us Fan Mail Why the good times in primary bond markets may not last The consequences of the ECB’s demand that banks buffer their leveraged finance positions on LBOs How that could play into the hands of private creditors The first couple of weeks in January are not just among the busiest of the year in the capital markets but can also tell us a lot about the year ahead. In the first GlobalCap...

Send us Fan Mail In GlobalCapital's last podcast of 2022, four of our journalists pick the moments from this year that stood out most for them as important, memorable... or amusing. We also discuss how the UK regulator is using Brexit to try and ease some of the harsh restrictions imposed on securitization by the EU since 2008 — while the EU is refusing to listen to the industry’s complaints....

Send us Fan Mail Will the easing of Chinese Covid rules help or harm emerging market issuers? How public sector issuers compete with a jumbo — and growing — borrower like the EU Private credit’s late bloom China relaxed some of its zero-Covid policy this week, giving hope that this will stimulate Chinese growth. We explain why that will be a boost for beleaguered emerging market bond issuers and i...

Send us Fan Mail Hungary, its investors and their ESG worries The digital bond markets take a step forward Aroundtown drama fails to cool hot hybrid market Hungary came to the markets this week with a privately placed increase of a dollar bond. Along with recent green bonds from the issuer, the response from some in the market was that the issuer was doing funding this way to avoid scrutiny over i...

Send us Fan Mail How much longer can the extraordinary run of bank bond issuance last? Are sustainability-linked bonds too complicated to be meaningful? New bond, old tricks: the art of underwriting returns It has been a record November for bank bond issuance and one of the busiest months for that market ever. That is, of course, unusual. What is even more unusual is that many in the market expect...

Send us Fan Mail Will the Santa rally in bonds last until Christmas? How much bond issuance will TLTRO repayments drive? Ithaca Energy: autopsy of an IPO  The first UK IPO of significance in a year might have been hoped to be a bellwether for future deals and perhaps spark a revival for listings. But the IPO of Ithaca Energy has not worked out quite as the company and its investors might have hope...

Send us Fan Mail The re-emergence of lender protection in leveraged finance How one Korean insurance company caused chaos in Asia’s bond market Climate resilience comes to sovereign bonds Some serious people in the leveraged finance market believe that covenants designed to protect investors are on their way back. That would mark the reversal of a trend that has been going on for perhaps 20 years...

Send us Fan Mail That the asset management industry – and the financial markets at large – has a problem with gender equality and women’s participation will be a shock to no one. But a recent survey laid bare just how stark the issue is despite years of debate about how to make the business a better place to work for half of the population. Two women with a wealth of financial markets experience j...

Send us Fan Mail Who’s in Who’s out Who’s paying for it Credit Suisse finally revealed its new strategy this week — breaking the firm up into three. Talk about a Swiss finish. Many of the details had been leaked in the run up to the announcement but it was no less momentous for all of that. The Swiss firm will keep its domestic operations, wealth and asseet management and markets businesses. Meanw...

Send us Fan Mail Will Liz Truss’s exit as prime minister be enough to calm the capital markets? What must her successor do to put the UK back on track? Plus who dares wins in corporate bonds and the far-reaching implications of HSBC ads being banned for greenwashing

Send us Fan Mail - Capital raising about to get tougher for companies - Chaos reigns in Gilt market With many corporate bond issuers in Europe heading into earnings blackout periods, fears are that once they release their results in a few weeks, the negative impact of inflation, supply chain disruption and rising rates will mean lower profits. That in turn will make capital markets tougher places...

Send us Fan Mail Following the PIF’s debut bond, is Saudi Arabia a credible green investment? The multitude of unusual tactics bond issuers are using to get deals done in difficult markets The Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, made a huge splash in bond markets this week with its debut deal. But the $3bn sale across three green tranches, including a 100 year bond – an u...

Send us Fan Mail The way out of UK market disarray Italian banks in a better state Bring back the bonus cap, say bankers   We analyse the disruption to capital markets this following new UK chancellor of the exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng’s plan to fund tax cuts and energy bill support through extra government bond issuance, which spread across currencies and asset classes and ended — or perhaps just pa...

Send us Fan Mail Uruguay has taken a step further along its path to issuing a sustainability-linked bond, which will be something new for the market to get its teeth into. And in an extra wrinkle, the South American sovereign borrower is proposing to pay investors less if it hits certain sustainability targets.  We take a look at how near this controversial idea is to becoming reality and whether...

Send us Fan Mail A number of senior bond bankers in Europe’s corporate bond market cannot for figure out why investors are buying what they have to sell. With US inflation above expectations this week suggesting central banks could be about to raise interest rates imminently, yet again, some bankers are having a hard time figuring out why you’d buy anything now that you could buy at a much better...

Send us Fan Mail Almost a year ago, we discussed the energy crisis for the first time on this podcast — how energy companies were using the capital markets in the face of higher demand for their product and what it meant for inflation. A year on, things are much worse. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a few months later has turbocharged that crisis to the point where this week governments are once aga...

Send us Fan Mail Earth Wind and Fire’s September , a nostalgic paean to the joys of the first month of autumn, might strike a chord with those involved in the business of raising bonds for companies and banks this year. Traditionally — along with January — one of the busiest months in the primary market calendar, most Septembers offer a bumper harvest of bond issuance as investors return form thei...

Send us Fan Mail Perenna is a company hoping to change the way home buyers borrow money in the UK with a system borrowed from Denmark. It claims its way of lending money will make housing more affordable. We test that claim and look into how this change could affect the covered bond and residential mortgage backed securities (RMBS) markets. With the number of publicly listed companies seemingly in...

Send us Fan Mail The Rhine, which flows through Germany's industrial heartlands, is drying up and that could spell trouble for the corporate bond market. A number of industrial giants — investment grade bond issuers with around €66bn of debt between them — all of a sudden can no longer use the river in the ways they are used to. They are struggling to get materials in, carry out their process...

Send us Fan Mail Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the US House of Representatives, riled China this week by dropping in on Taiwan. The ripples of the visit spread across the Asian bond market, already suffering from myriad pressures both local and global. Issuers pulled deals as investors worried about just how far China would go in its retaliation but it was not such a bad week for every borrower, as Sin...

Send us Fan Mail From the German equity capital markets, through leveraged finance, to the hairier parts of the blue chips’ balance sheets, raising capital is not easy if you’re a corporate treasurer. We take a look at the problems hindering Frankfurt-listed companies from raising equity capital and what they propose to do about it — not to mention the perils they face if they do. But we also look...