Top quality issuers boost debt capital markets
Forget the broken banking system
Even governments face supply constraints
The Future of Capital
The world is running out of capital just as companies realize they urgently need to raise equity, like the banks before them, to strengthen their finances as recession bites. The desperate search is on for wealthy investors willing and able to take strategic stakes to anchor big equity deals. Peter Lee reports.
AN ENGLISH INVESTMENT banker recounts the most troubling moment of a recent business trip abroad. "I was going through passport control and they asked me the purpose of my visit and what I did. For the first time in my career, I thought ‘I can’t say I’m a banker, I’ve got to say something else... maybe I can tell them that I’m a doctor’". Amused at this confession of shame and embarrassment at his own profession, the banker’s colleague chips in helpfully: "He told them he was a masseur."
He shouldn’t feel so bad. The irony is that, while they have been cast, probably rightly, as the villains of the piece, investment bankers and their core skills – the ability to marry up the capital needs of financially stretched issuers and the investment objectives of those lucky few still with cash to put to work – have never been more acutely needed than they are today.
