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Scaling new heights
In the space of a year, Saudi Arabia has established a debt management office, sold a jumbo syndicated loan and issued the biggest publicly syndicated sovereign bond deal in history. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is IFR’s Issuer and SSAR Issuer of the Year.
Seismic shift
The overhaul of banking regulation in recent years has forced lenders around the world to shake up their balance sheets and reshape their funding strategies, HSBC more so than any other. For taking on a seemingly insurmountable funding target – and making it almost look easy – HSBC is IFR’s Financial Issuer of the Year.
Junk science
Junk-rated Dell sold a US$20bn investment-grade M&A bond. It was the fourth-largest corporate bond ever – but just one piece of a highly creative US$38bn fundraising effort that is IFR’s Corporate Issuer of the Year.
Rock-bottom interest rates, quantitative easing and negative yields have turned the fixed-income investor universe upside down. How do fund managers make sense of these changes and how are they positioning their portfolios in response?
2016 couldn’t have been much worse for equity capital markets bankers: big spikes in volatility, intermittent periods of market closure, pulled deals and a collapse in fees. How have they weathered the storm, and how will they carry their injuries into 2017?
Chinese banks and brokers are taking over the Asian investment banking league tables, as more mainland issuers and investors turn to the international markets. Global rivals need to rethink their approach.
Big banks have lost more than US$60bn in their corporate centres in the last four years. Some critics say the units can mask the true performance of business divisions.
The rise and rise of the passive fund is yet another result of the low interest rate environment. And a worrying one.
A long-term commitment to re-balancing the Chinese economy should make the M&A boom more sustainable. But worries about capital flight and the renminbi’s weakness may force the authorities to put a stop to the party.
Fintech start-ups have mostly played around the edges of investment banks’ core activities – but not for much longer. The global financial full-service model was already creaking, but an Uber-style disruption to front-office activity is no longer a distant threat.
A growing realisation that over-enthusiastic and uncoordinated banking regulation is damaging the real economy, combined with the shock election victory of Donald Trump, is likely to see the regulatory onslaught of the post-financial crisis period lessen in intensity, if not reverse course.
