Investors’ fears about the limitations of the debt capital markets have reached extreme levels of late. A UK treasurer recently told Euromoney about an incident his firm experienced earlier this year.
"An investor approached us on a roadshow and said: ‘You have a big maturity next year of €2 billion, how are you going to refinance it?’ Our CEO was quite puzzled so we went into the office, because that day it was a public holiday. When we looked at the Bloomberg we saw there was in fact a deal due next year summer for 2 billion – the only problem is that the investor didn’t notice it was in yen! That is a slight difference to €2 billion euro – ¥2 billion is something like €15 million. Someone needs to get his eyesight checked!"