The Iran war and a mounting energy crisis battered UK government bonds in March, with short-dated Gilts registering their worst month in nearly three years.

Deutsche Bank has appointed Joe Lai has head of Asia Pacific investment banking and capital markets, according to an internal memo seen by IFR.

Spare a thought for the bond traders. 

Volumes in equity options that expire the same day they’re traded have hit a new record this month as more institutional investors have turned to the ultra-short-dated derivatives to shield themselves against the market fallout from the war in Iran.

KBC Bank and Komercni Banka followed the template ING and Erste set out earlier in the week to secure solid covered bond transactions on Wednesday, capping what bankers described as the best week for euro covered bond supply since the war in the Middle East began more than one month ago. 

Veolia Environnement (Baa1/BBB) made the most of a solid market window on Wednesday to bring the first corporate deal of the week in the euro arena, landing it with no new issue concession.

Italian wholesale digital infrastructure operator FiberCop launched an upsized €1bn five-year non-call life senior secured bond on Wednesday, after testing appetite for a potential new issue among investors earlier in the week.

Independent oil operator Vista Energy Argentina is readying a return to the dollar bond market to help fund its purchase of assets in the country's vast shale field, known as Vaca Muerta, or Dead Cow. 

CLO bankers are struggling to get CLO deals priced, especially ahead of the long Easter weekend, with funding costs elevated due to the war in Iran, which is also curtailing investor risk appetite. 

EdgeConneX has become a casualty of the recent volatility in the European securitisation market after Fitch downgraded the class A2 notes of the US data centre operator's debut European deal just a week after it priced. 

Nonbank issuers in Australia have been navigating a challenging RMBS market with long execution times that leave them particularly vulnerable during the current heightened volatility.   

Securitisation offers a promising route to fill an over US$100bn funding gap to build data centres in the Asia Pacific, but this solution is still a while away, according to market participants

Mexico has set a new benchmark for sovereign sustainable finance with an updated framework that accommodates an unprecedented array of ESG labels – including badges like biodiversity, nature and resilience/adaptation – while also integrating the country’s sustainable taxonomy.

The UK's influential Transition Finance Council has published an exposure draft of its Transition Finance Guidelines, which are designed to assess the credibility of companies' transition plans and scale up transition financing globally. 

More European companies have adaptation and resilience plans in place than their global peers but progress is at a very early stage and none of the plans are advanced, according to research by S&P. 

French private debt and equity firm Eurazeo's Planetary Boundaries fund has secured more than half of its €750m target, which it intends to keep in place as fundraising continues. 

Blackstone injected a standard piece of US practice into Europe on Tuesday with the inclusion of a greenshoe in its €77.6m first post-IPO selldown in Spanish gaming group Cirsa Enterprises.

HMH navigated a difficult market to raise US$210.4m from its Nasdaq IPO late Tuesday, providing liquidity for its principal backers while right-sizing its capital structure.

HD Korea Shipbuilding & Offshore Engineering has raised US$1.55bn from the sale of an upsized exchangeable bond with the shares of HD Hyundai Heavy Industries as the underlying.

Investment banks leading SpaceX's mega-IPO are set to hold a kick-off meeting next week with the broader syndicate of banks involved in the deal, according to people familiar with the process.

Syndicated lending in EMEA totalled US$309bn in the first quarter of 2026, 19% lower than in the first three months of 2025, according to LPC data, but the loan market remained resilient in the face of persistent geopolitical and economic headwinds.

Against the backdrop of volatility, induced by the war in the Middle East, the emergence of AI as a buzzword and its uncertain, potential impact across various industry sectors, as well as simmering headlines around private credit portfolios, US lenders ushered nearly US$779bn through the broadly syndicated loan market in the first quarter, a 6% decline compared to the first three months of 2025.   

Spice maker McCormick has commitments for a US$15.7bn bridge loan in place to support its approximately US$44.8bn combination with the foods business of Unilever. 

Cloud infrastructure firm CoreWeave has secured an US$8.5bn delayed draw term loan to expand its artificial intelligence cloud platform, as demand for computing power continues to surge. 

It is unusual for a listed company to buy income-bearing securities of a peer as a treasury decision. In orthodox corporate finance, surplus capital is meant to do one of three things: fund projects that clear the hurdle rate, preserve liquidity, or be returned to shareholders. It is not normally redeployed into another company exposed to much the same trade, especially at a lower yield than the investing company pays on its own stock.

Private credit mishaps are coming at us with such speed and intensity that many of the stories are blurring into one. But rather than the private credit crisis dragging banks down, it might give them an opportunity to play offensively in this space.

The easiest way to hide a credit loss is not to deny it. It is to say it has not yet arrived. That was one of the quiet accounting failures exposed by the global financial crisis: losses were often recognised too late, only after the damage was obvious. IFRS 9 was supposed to fix that by forcing lenders to book expected credit losses earlier, using forward-looking judgment rather than waiting for the wreckage.

I played rugby as a schoolboy. I wasn’t too bad, playing for East Yorkshire a few times at under-16 level. My position was scrum-half, which meant I had a lot of the ball. And being in the thick of things, one soon learns to be nimble and quick-thinking to avoid being crushed by rampaging forwards.