Euroblog

International observers have been called in to deal with the fallout over alleged misconduct in the most important count of the last 12 months.

The life of a syndicate banker is fraught with early mornings and sleep deprivation, meaning weekends and holidays are a crucial time for recharging your batteries and hiding the bags under your eyes. Unless, of course, you’re blessed with the boundless energy of National Australia Bank’s Nigel Owen.

Blog thought most bankers working in the sovereign debt market would have been rejoicing as the No votes piled up when the results from the Scottish independence came in the wee small hours of Friday morning. After all, trying to explain the new constitutional setup of Scotland and the rest of the UK to overseas investors would be pretty difficult, especially considering none of the politicians seemed to know what it was supposed to look like either. Not to mention trying to work out which entity exactly would be on the hook for different parts of the UK’s debt pile.

In the Middle East, Emirates NBD has announced a unique approach to asset liability management — physically masticating its outstanding bonds. Most issuers would take the traditional approach of simply buying back their debt in the secondary market, or switching bondholders into a new transaction. Not Emirates NBD. The borrower has whipped up a flurry of interest in a controversial plan to simply eat — as in actually swallow — its dollar bonds.

You do not spend just short of two decades in two of Europe’s top debt capital markets syndicate teams if you crumble under pressure.

A shocking email for anyone planning a work jolly to Moscow landed in the Blog inbox last week, revealing: “Russian beer weakness to continue.”

Bankers are feeling the squeeze these days. So when it comes to the issue of school fees, creative thinking may be required, especially in London where competition for the best schools is keen and fees are even keener.

Sometimes Blog finds itself in the company of debt bankers with real class. Not just the kind of autodidactic epicure who knows which knife and fork to use and how to sniff around a wine list (skills which even the humble-born develop through years of client relations) but genuine old money aristocracy.

The DCM revenues of UBS surged this quarter, in part because of strong performance from the bank’s leveraged finance business. To the untrained eye, that might seem a direct result of the burst of high yield bond issuance in recent months. But Blog thinks otherwise.

Borrowers of the world form a queue, Blog accidentally discovered the world’s greatest funding official this week.

The perils of ever taking a holiday in the fast moving world of capital markets journalism were never more in evidence than this week, when a hapless Blog reporter emailed the European Union’s senior borrowing advisor Herbert Barth with a request for an interview.

As the final moments of the dramatic FIFA World Cup drew to a close on Sunday night — with Germany’s 1-0 victory against Argentina sealing their country’s place in the annals of history as the 2014 world champion — fixed income dealers across Europe were still frenetically tracking down and trading, not bonds but Panini stickers.