Search results for

It's been a tough year for many borrowers in the international capital markets. Corporate issuers in particular have fallen quickly from grace, having been the market's darlings a year ago. Now fixed income investors across the world are increasingly risk-averse. Certain sectors of the primary markets, US high yield for example, are very difficult to access. In response to these troubles, many of those borrowers that bankers and investors have nominated to be awarded for their efforts in the past 12 months have reverted to a strategy first made popular by Fannie Mae two years ago. They are striving to produce large, liquid benchmark issues that will at least give investors the comfort that they can easily trade in and out.

Abbey National’s eye-catching mortgage-backed securitization (MBS) programme has touched a new height with its £2.25 billion ($3.375 billion) Holmes Financing 1, the largest ever securitization of European mortgages. Brian Morrison, the bank’s director of treasury services and international, says making the bonds fully SEC registered opens up a vast investor base in the US. “This takes us into a new ball game, which is the really big market,” he says.

Described as being Castro’s favourite capitalist, much to the disdain of the US Treasury Department, Ian Delaney, chairman of Sherritt International Corporation, the Toronto based mining company, is back in the news. Five years after being accused of “doing a deal with the devil” by Marc Thiessen, an aide of the US Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee for daring to invest in Cuba and going against the US government’s anti-Cuban Helms-Burton legislation, Sherritt’s Delaney has now annoyed the Germans. And there’s going to be a face-off in the courtroom.

Should the bankers who for the last two years led Nasdaq's internet IPO bonanza, until the bubble burst in April, be held in any way to blame? The new issue houses don't think so. Although they put their name to many deals which have since flopped, they were midwives to many more that made punters rich. It was impossible to slow "borderline goofy" demand when the feeding frenzy was at its height. Internet IPOs became their own crazy asset class. However those frothy IPOs, which deprived many internet companies of committed core shareholders, may hasten their doom. Antony Currie reports