Euroblog

With most of Europe — come to mention it, most the world — opting for couch versus desk last Tuesday, the week was ideally set up for relaxed lunches. Working so close to Adam Smith’s birthplace rather precludes London-based bankers taking a day off to celebrate a day for the workers.

There’s no denying that Spain has stolen the world’s attention for the past couple of weeks. Barça and Real ousted in the Champions League semi-finals, King Juan Carlos finally noticing the elephant in the room — but getting Spanish real estate mixed up with a real animal and managing to shoot it in the face just to prove the point that monarchs can’t be voted out of office... Oh, and a two notch downgrade from some company no-one has really heard of, called something like “Candid & Jaw's” or “Sanded & Moor's”...

Getting away from it all seemed to be the name of the game for much of the FIG world in the week following Easter. The European Banking Authority did its best to scupper holiday plans, releasing its 57 page consultation on regulatory technical standards for own funds a day before the long weekend. That added to the pressure a day before Deutsche’s Gerald Podobnik was due to set off for a relaxed break in Austria, and caught others on the hop: Royal Bank of Scotland’s A.J. Davidson was on the road — literally, cruising down the all-American sounding West Side Highway — dealing with patchy signals as he dialed in to London to stay on top of the news.

Ask any Argentine and they will tell you their country has a long and noble history of European influence. Buenos Aires, that most continental of South American cities, is awash with European imports — pizza, Fernet, architecture, beauty, arrogance (not necessarily in that order) — so it might seem a natural destination for a sophisticated banker from that other great European export, UniCredit.

In exchange for their employees’ souls, investment banks like to provide luxurious facilities so that said employees do not question quite why so much of their life is dedicated to hamstering away at Excel spreadsheets and such, and to instil a fear of having to join the penniless masses on the tubes and buses for whom a midday trip to Pret is a Bacchanalian treat.

As the corporate bond market tested the limits of journalistic extremism this week (where does one go when “on fire” no longer seems adequate? Flaming supply? Out of control issuance? A raging inferno of a corporate bond market?), one long standing syndicator was MIA. Yes, sadly, the Irish lilt of UBS’s Barry Donlon was nowhere to be heard.

The Euromoney Seminars high yield conference stood out for many reasons this year – one of which was the “lunatics” comment in relation to those high yield investors who have the temerity to root for voting rights.

Australian issuers are becoming a bit of a joke in the European corporate bond market. Hold on, hold on, don’t get offended, put that cricket bat down! There’s nothing wrong with Aussie credit risk, in fact investors love it at the moment, with all that sunshine and exposure to mining and China.

EuroBlog supped fine wine with a former trader this week, and never again will we drink wine unswilled and lacking in aeration. We know it comes in red or white, sweet or dry, and could probably tell a Domaine de la Romanée-Conti from a Sainsbury’s Basics (as the label declares, “Wine for the table, not the cellar”) but beyond that we’re clueless.

A securitisation for Center Parcs, a UK events and family holiday chain, turned out to be a great opportunity for investors to pack the Speedos and go on a day out.

After Lucy Kellaway’s column about the guff adorning UBS’s internal dining menu caused such a stir, Euroblog hoped last week to uncover similar fatuous nuggets lurking in Citigroup’s client entertainment documentation.

It’s no secret that optimism is hard-wired into syndicate officials. In fact, it’s practically in the job description. Markets never widen. Rather, investors take profit. And when things are tightening by a basis point or two, the market is On Fire.