Asia’s capital markets revive

September 01, 2000

As Asia's markets emerge battered and bruised from three years of crisis and recovery, the region’s shell-shocked bankers and issuers are starting to pick up the pieces and look towards a brighter future. Bond and loan markets are showing signs of tentative recovery, equity markets are alternating between bewilderment and elation, and the samurai bond market remains intent on defying conventional economics. Gill Baker reports







Tokyo: increasingly Asian sovereigns and corporates are funding themselves in Japan

"The debt markets have been particularly interesting from the yen perspective," says David Russell, executive director for debt capital markets at Nomura International in Hong Kong. "With the zero interest rate policy in Japan there have been a lot of good reasons to look at borrowing in yen," he adds. "We have seen a few yen issues coming, but more important we have seen a really strong appetite in Japan for A credits, particularly driven by the post-1997 currency crisis. The big problem we have is bringing issuers to the market - there are not enough issues ready to come to the market."

The samurai market died in 1998, with total volume thinning to around ¥52 billion ($477 million), but so far this year volume has surpassed that for 1998 and 1999 combined and has already gone through the ¥1 trillion mark.

Asia’s capital markets revive

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