Coronavirus

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) will need to see more evidence that its capital reforms restrict “buffer usability” and have “(pro)cyclical” impacts before it recommends any changes to the framework.

Asia’s capital markets had a hot first quarter, with volumes soaring across both DCM and ECM. Momentum still appears strong — but market participants should brace themselves for a tough time ahead.

Hong Kong is facing the possibility of a fifth Covid-19 wave in the city, with the latest virus bubble infiltrating the financial industry.

One big crisis should be enough for anyone's career. But Sir Robert Stheeman, chief executive of the UK's Debt Management Office, has had to face two monumental financial catastrophes in the last 13 years — first the 2008 UK banking crisis and then last year's pandemic.

The Restaurant Group, the owner of numerous UK dining brands including Wagamama and Frankie & Benny’s, launched a £175m equity raising on Wednesday to see it through to the end of the UK’s Covid-19 lockdown.

The World Bank and the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) have partnered up for a new privately placed deal to front-load funding to the agency — the first time the World Bank has partnered with a UN agency in this way.

Pablo de Ramón-Laca is director general of the treasury and financial policy at Spain's Ministry of Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation. That places him in charge of the world's ninth largest sovereign debt stock, according to S&P data, for a country pummelled by the Covid-19 pandemic. Spain has the second highest number of cases in the EU and the seventh highest in the world. But even that is not the full story of the pandemic's impact.

The thinking that the additional tier one (AT1) market should go back to trading through its pre-pandemic valuations holds big risks.

Two factors bear outsized influence on capital markets — Covid-19 and central bank stimulus. But the temptation to see these powerful forces culminating in one of two extreme outcomes — another crash as a feeble economy flounders, or a boom like the 1920s US — must be resisted.

The Asian Development Bank brought a pair of new themed bonds to the market this week, printing its first gender bond in Kazakhstani tenge as well as its first education bond.

Bank bond spreads widened on the back of negative sentiment this week, but a handful of lenders were still able to take advantage of a constructive backdrop in the new issue market.

JD Sports, the UK sporting equipment retailer, is looking at the possibility of raising equity capital to help it through the next few months of Covid-19 lockdowns and to take advantage of investment opportunities in the future.