Singapore Telecommunications is removing the unique features of a class of shares created at its privatisation three decades ago when the government tried to engage Singaporeans to invest in the stock market.

Bernstein plans to deepen its research coverage as its equities joint venture with Societe Generale enters a new phase after two years of operation, with the expanded tie-up supporting a buildout of the French bank's equity capital markets business, senior executives said.

JP Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon took aim at "nonsensical" bank regulations, complex geopolitics and the need to build a stronger banking system in Europe, among other wide-ranging topics in his latest annual shareholder letter, calling parts of new capital rules wrong and "un-American".

A ceasefire may be in place between the US, Israel and Iran but the impact of the nearly six-week conflict in the Middle East will be felt by many sovereigns, particularly oil and gas importers, for some considerable time more, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Tight pricing. Relatively big books. Risky deal structures. It was almost as if the war in the Middle East was over judging by some of the new bond issues in the second half of the week as issuers took advantage of a window that unexpectedly emerged as a two-week ceasefire began.

Issuers from the Middle East and North Africa are opting to fund through private placements as an uncertain ceasefire agreement continues to keep public deals on hold. 

The Democratic Republic of the Congo raised more than it initially intended on Thursday with a US$1.25bn dual-tranche transaction as it finally achieved its goal of issuing in the international markets.

The World Bank has stepped up its revived programme of Italian retail investor-targeted borrowing with its debut transaction through UniCredit. The Triple A rated development lender, which sourced lightly structured deals as large as US$668m and US$397m in the country during the 2010s, passing US$1bn in 2016 alone, issued €21.386m of fixed-rate callable notes through the Italian/German bank.

European securitisation markets are showing early signs of a post-Easter revival, with a debut transaction from Advanzia Bank reopening primary markets, market participants said. =

KKR hit the commercial mortgage-backed security market last week to refinance an office tower in San Francisco that was once the headquarters for Dropbox, which has vacated the premises and been replaced by a roster of other corporate tenants.

The European Banking Authority said in a Q&A posted on its website that a credit rating can only be used to calculate regulatory risk weights if it is publicly disclosed, clarifying an issue debated by market practitioners. 

ClearLight on Monday landed its first solar securitisation in what has been a slow start to the year in this corner of the ABS market. 

Sustainable finance will play a central role in raising hundreds of billions of pounds of private capital over the next decade to fund the UK government's ambitious growth and infrastructure plans and help meet its net-zero targets. 

Global tech hyperscalers are exploring voluntary nature and biodiversity credits in the UK and Europe to offset the environmental impact of data centres, as well as mandatory credits to meet the UK's Biodiversity Net Gain regulation. 

The World Bank has stepped up its revived programme of Italian retail investor-targeted borrowing with its debut transaction through UniCredit. The Triple A rated development lender, which sourced lightly structured deals as large as US$668m and US$397m in the country during the 2010s, passing US$1bn in 2016 alone, issued €21.386m of fixed-rate callable notes through the Italian/German bank.

Development financing trends are going in the wrong direction, although sustainable finance innovations improve the picture somewhat, a United Nations task force of more than 60 agencies and international organisations said.

ECM bankers are rushing to seize the window created by the initial two-week ceasefire agreement between the US, Israel and Iran, bringing deals last week that totalled US$3.2bn.

Hong Kong's long IPO application queue raises the question of how long issuers will be able to wait to raise funds and whether they will turn their attention to other listing venues.

The US$75bn IPO of Elon Musk’s SpaceX in June is expected to crowd out other listings in the US for at least a couple of weeks, but bankers are pondering the consequences of an unprecedented deal on what they have planned in Europe thousands of miles away. 

The Securities and Exchange Board of India has provided concessions to issuers struggling to launch share deals amid the Middle East war, extending the validity of IPO approvals expiring between April 1 and September 30 so all are valid until September 30.

The prospect of a windfall in leveraged loan issuance tied to leveraged buyouts has failed to materialise as the US war with Iran drags on, injecting fresh volatility into credit markets and dampening risk appetite for new deals.

Direct lenders are preparing to gather for an annual private credit conference at a critical moment for the industry, as retail investors seek to pull large sums of capital from the asset class and some fund managers cap share redemptions.

Paramount Skydance signed US$10bn of loans to back its US$110bn acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery. The move establishes more permanent loan support than the US$57.5bn of debt the company secured in December, and has resulted in the bridge loan’s size being cut to US$49bn from its original US$54bn. 

US investment-grade loan issuance surged to a record start to the year, but bankers are bracing for a slowdown in large-scale M&A as macro uncertainty clouds corporate confidence. 

Citigroup chief executive Jane Fraser manages a team of rivals who might aspire to her job. Competition is healthy but appointing a new president as a deputy could help Fraser deliver the next phase of her growth plan.

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.