Global news and insight for corporate financial professionals
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 ...
GLOBAL EQUITY/DRS Saudi Arabia’s Inma Bank, a new Islamic financial institution, raised $2.8 billion in its initial public offering of a 70% stake in April, the largest-ever IPO in the kingdom. Samba Capital, a subsidiary of Samba Financial, was ...
MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS With the credit crunch putting a damper on private equity deals, mergers and acquisitions have declined, but companies are still willing to dip into cash reserves and even borrow significant amounts of money to ...
SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS Financial turmoil and an economy on the brink of recession are testing US companies’ determination to reduce their environmental impact. Growing fears about a global economic slowdown and the credit crunch wreaked havoc on global financial ...
Global Equity/drs The Shanghai Stock Exchange raised more funds in initial public offerings last year than any exchange worldwide, and it is taking aim at another record in 2008, despite a 30% pullback in the Shanghai composite index ...
Mergers & Acquisitions HDFC Bank and Centurion Bank of Punjab have agreed to the biggest merger in Indian banking history, valued at about $2.4 billion. It is likely the beginning of a wave of M&A; deals in the ...
Corporate Debt Credit spreads widened last month and corporate bond yields were at or above levels that prevailed prior to the start of the Federal Reserve’s monetary easing last summer, leading economists to conclude that the US economy ...
MERGERS & ACQUISITIONS Apart from the ongoing consolidation in the financial services industry, January was an extremely slow month for mergers and acquisitions. That all changed quickly on February 1, however, with Microsoft’s $44.6 billion bid for ...
SOVEREIGN WEALTH FUNDS Sovereign wealth funds snap up bargains in one of the biggest financial industry land grabs in history. Bader Al Sa'ad, head of Kuwait's SWF, helped arrange a huge cash infusion for Citi. To say Citi and ...
CORPORATE DEBT While financial engineering has been tarnished in the current credit crunch, market participants say collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and other forms of securitization have their place in a modern financial system and will come back strong ...
GLOBAL EQUITY/DRS Mumbai-based Reliance Power raised $3 billion in January in India’s largest-ever initial public offering. The shares sold represented a 10% stake in the company, which aims to provide electricity to power the country’s fast growth but which so ...
MARKET FORCES / EQUITY DERIVATIVES Corporations might be wary of employing complex financial instruments in the wake of the credit crunch, but a closer look at the anatomy of the meltdown suggests equity derivatives still present some interesting opportunities. ...
Corporate Debt While money market pressures appear to be slowly receding, worries about a possible US recession that could trigger a surge in corporate defaults are moving to the fore for 2008. “If round one of the current credit crisis ...