Year in Numbers

London, September 1992: That dreaded phone call from your boss – can you come to my office, on the hop? Bloody hell, what whingeing salesman had I beat up this time, or could it be a midday risk exposure check or, worse, yet another meeting with the lawyers. But it was none of those things: instead, at that meeting and several more over the following days I was recruited to help plot an assault on an elderly woman – the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, aka the Bank of England. I was running Morgan Stanley’s fixed-income balance sheet in...

Issuers breathed a sigh of relief when bond markets finally reopened to high-yield energy companies in February. CrownRock, encouraged by a 20% rally in the price of crude over the previous three days, rushed a deal to market, breaking a three-month hiatus – and in style, gaining US$1.5bn of orders for its planned US$300m deal. As oil rallied back above US$60 over the next few weeks, others followed in its wake. Bumper deals returned as investors bet the precipitous drop in oil – crude had plunged from US$107 a barrel to US$42 in just six...

It is common practice, investment manager Neuberger Berman wrote in a client note, to use protective wrap when shipping fragile items. “Regulators have similarly tried to employ regulations to shield investors from a bubble in the US credit market,” it said. In 2013, regulators provided guidance that said leveraged loans should use pro-forma leverage of no more than six times, as measured by total debt/Ebitda; and have the ability to fully amortise secured debt or repay 50% of the total debt over a five to seven-year horizon. It was not until...

There was a time, not all that many years ago, when central banks seemingly controlled the world. I’m not talking the eras of Ben Bernanke or even Alan Greenspan, but of the 1980s when Paul Volcker ruled the Federal Reserve, Karl Otto Pohl was master of the Bundesbank, Fritz Leutwyler was at the Swiss National Bank and Robin Leigh-Pemberton was governor of the Bank of England. These four men, in concert, sat on top of the world. Truth be told, it was easier then. Hedge funds were few and far between, while leverage, in much of the world at...

Minimal lending rates and a more positive tone to stock markets – at least during the first half of the year – sent out mixed messages to the structured equity market during 2015: there was good news for issuers of exchangeable bonds who were willing to sell down stock holdings in other companies, but convertible bond issuers had little need to sell options on their own shares as a means of subsidising internal borrowing costs. That dichotomy is borne out by the data. Exchangeable bond volumes in Europe, the Middle East and Africa to...

Narendra Modi swept to power in the world’s second-most populous country with promises of bold reform. But his privatisation plan, one of the cornerstones of an ambitious campaign to revitalise the Indian economy, has had only mixed success. To help balance the budget, Modi pledged to raise upward of US$10bn by selling minority stakes in state enterprises to the private sector; he has managed barely half that amount. And many of the part-privatisations were near-disasters, salvaged at the very last moment by state-run investment vehicles....

While many of their Western rivals went into full-on retrenchment mode this year, Japan’s commercial banking giants, BTMU, Mizuho and Sumitomo Mitsui, continued their global expansion. In doing so, they secured impressive footholds in the upper division of the league tables: all three came in the top 20 of global investment banking fee earners in the first 11 months of 2015, according to Thomson Reuters/Freeman data, which captures wallet across M&A, debt and equity capital markets, and syndicated lending. In the US, BTMU (16th) and Mizuho...

The definition of insanity, Albert Einstein once postulated, is to do the same thing over and over again and each time expect different results. We all do it, of course: yet no one person or institution is more insane than the nation-state that adamantly refuses to learn from past mistakes. If a plan failed last time, governments often tell themselves, it was surely the result of bad implementation – and not because it was just a bad plan. So why not try it again? Over the past year, we have seen that sort of skewed thinking again invade the...

Pre-IPO fundraisings entered the mainstream as a source of funding for fast-growing technology companies in the US and Europe in recent years. But they also have the potential to disrupt the traditional IPO process. Uber Technologies became the world’s most valuable start-up in 2015 with a series of private fundraising rounds that pushed it beyond the US$50bn valuation carried by Facebook before its IPO. But while Facebook’s last round of capital-raising was soon followed by its public market debut, Uber has no such plans. In adopting this...