| Grant Kvalheim | ||||||
Even a year ago US bulge-bracket firms refused to acknowledge that a foreign bank could come within striking distance of having a decent US bond business. That's no longer the case.
This year, in large part because of the boom in global multi-currency and dollar deals and greater European investor participation in them, UBS Warburg and Deutsche Bank have made serious headway in the dollar bond new issue and secondary market rankings.
"There has been a tremendous increase in the efforts of foreign banks in the US bond market," says a managing director in global debt capital markets at a top-four bulge-bracket firm. "UBS Warburg has a huge trading effort and keeps getting bigger. It is a contender with everything it does, as is Deutsche."
Deutsche, after years of expensive hires and false starts, clawed its way to 10th in the US domestic bond market by the beginning of September, compared with 16th this time a year ago.