Global news and insight for corporate financial professionals
SPOTLIGHT / EMERGING MARKETS Emerging markets have been some of the best performers of recent years. Is their continued growth now under threat? Since the credit crunch began more than a year ago, it has inflicted most pain on ...
CORPORATE DEBT Less than $1 billion of US high-yield bonds were sold in August, one of the lowest monthly totals ever, as rising defaults and widening spreads above US treasury securities steered investors away from the market. Caribbean Restaurants, the ...
GLOBAL Vazza: Expects the default rate to continue growing. As private equity investors size up the new opportunities the credit crunch presents, companies in their sights might do well to consider a report published ...
GLOBAL EQUITY/DRS Hong Kong’s stock exchange has put a framework in place to begin trading depositary receipts, which will make it the only Asian exchange to allow DR issuers to target retail investors. Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKex) ...
MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS Europe passed the United States in corporate dealmaking in August thanks to two large transactions, including a spin-off and a hostile bid. The total of US mergers and acquisitions for the year to date of $849 billion, ...
CORPORATE DEBT More than a year after the credit crunch burst onto the global stage, regulators and banks are still searching for a way to end the crisis, which appears to be morphing into a chronic condition. The ...
MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS Midland, Michigan-based Dow Chemical forged an unusual alliance of bankers and investors to finance its $18.6 billion acquisition of specialty-chemicals maker Rohm and Haas. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and the Kuwait Investment Authority, a sovereign ...
GLOBAL EQUITY/DRS Strange as it may seem, there have been bigger initial public offerings since the credit crunch hit, but fewer of them. Global IPO activity reached an all-time high of $287 billion in proceeds in 2007 but ...
CORPORATE DEBT A consortium led by major investment banks active in the huge over-the-counter derivatives market in credit default swaps (CDS) plans to launch a central clearinghouse by September in an effort to reduce counterparty risk in the ...
GLOBAL EQUITY/DRS JPMorgan has added new depositary receipt specialists in Argentina, Brazil and Singapore to assist the growing number of companies in these countries that want to have their equity traded on exchanges outside their home markets. The ...
MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS The agreement announced last month by Verizon Wireless to buy rural cell phone service provider Alltel for $5.9 billion in cash and $22.2 billion in debt did more than create the biggest mobile-phone company ...
FOCUS / CREDIT DERIVATIVES As global securitization markets continue to deteriorate, the credit derivatives space is a beacon of light in a relatively dark landscape. Long: The key is to determine which structures have been hurt which have stability. ...
GLOBAL Slim pickings: Banks are less keen on lending. As the fallout from the subprime debacle continues, companies are finding they can no longer rely on their long-standing banking providers for credit. In fact, according to a ...
MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS The volume of worldwide mergers and acquisitions totaled $730 billion in announced deals in the first quarter of 2008, a decline of 24.2% from the first quarter of 2007 and the lowest level for ...
GLOBAL EQUITY/DRS China was the world’s biggest market for initial public offerings last year, but its IPO market has shriveled following a sharp drop in stock prices since last October, while the long-dormant market in Thailand is coming back ...
GLOBAL Stressed out: Concern over financial risks has grown sharply. One of the most extensive surveys of global banks’ attitudes toward risk has found that liquidity and credit spreads continue to keep bankers awake at night. ...
CORPORATE DEBT The latest bank lending surveys by the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank (ECB) demonstrated that credit standards have tightened further, indicating that the credit crunch hasn’t lost its bite, analysts say. The tightening of ...
GLOBAL Hard landing: Delta's merger with Northwest may make it the biggest airline, but analysts question its prospects. The world’s biggest airline in terms of traffic will be created if the proposed merger of Delta Air Lines and ...
CORPORATE DEBT Oracle, the world’s third-largest software maker, sold $5 billion of bonds in April, and the successful sale helped to dispel some of the gloom in the corporate bond market. Oracle’s offering of three series of investment-grade ...
UNITED STATES George Soros: The "scariest" part of the current turmoil is CDSs. George Soros, founder and chairman of Soros Fund Management, warned the World Economic Forum in Davos in January that the world is facing its ...