Year In Numbers

Bunds were hardly a screaming buy at the beginning of 2016. Far from it: shorter-dated paper offered investors next to no yield at all; and even at the longer end, a 0.1% coupon on 30-year debt must have seemed like scant compensation for all the risks that might befall the investment during that time. But applying that logic might have cost you your job: Bunds were one of the best-performing assets in 2016. If you’d started the year buying German government debt maturing in 2046, by the end of July you’d have been sitting on a paper gain of...

Few equity capital markets bankers will look back fondly on 2016. For most, the year was a long, uncomfortable ride that saw markets lurch from one extreme to the other – a year of political upheaval in the UK and Brazil, of a collapse in the wider commodity complex, and of ebbing confidence in China’s growth model. Along the way, deal after deal was caught out; almost every team came out the year scarred in one way or another. To make matters worse, many also finished one of the most challenging years in ECM with little to show for it. Fees...

China completed its takeover of the Asian capital markets in 2016 – at least in terms of numbers. Combining debt and equity in all currencies, nine of the region’s top 10 underwriters are Chinese. Where four global banks ranked among the top 10 in 2015, only HSBC – arguably the most Chinese of the global banks – managed that in 2016, ranking ninth on the Thomson Reuters league table. The step change in 2016 has come from the growth in outbound investment from China, sluggish deal flow elsewhere in Asia and the continued growth of China’s...

Banks are under pressure to improve the consistency and transparency around their so-called corporate centres due to concerns that the units have become “black boxes” that are used to make other divisions appear better than they are. Eleven major banks lost more than US$60bn in aggregate in their corporate centres over the past four years, according to IFR calculations. Such losses are not a surprise given that many of the units carry big central costs and bring in little revenue, but investors and analysts said there is concern about the...

It’s commonly acknowledged that 2016 has been a difficult year both for traders and investors. Volatility, the life-blood of performance, has been sporadic and very much a case of feast or famine. The current year always feels much tougher than the last so no doubt we will find ourselves looking back at 2016 and agreeing that it wasn’t all that bad after all. Volatility is a little bit like a car with two steering wheels. The first one comes from the very nature of the fear and greed factors, but the second is the matter of liquidity which is...

Stories from the pitching process for the IFR Awards

Global mergers and acquisitions activity fell in 2016 from the previous year’s record, but there was one pocket of extraordinary growth – the record volume of cross-border acquisitions by Chinese companies across Europe and the US. Chinese companies have been busy buying Western assets over the last three years, diversifying overseas to combat a slowdown in their domestic economy. But this trend accelerated dramatically in February 2016 when China National Chemical Corp, or ChemChina, launched a US$46.6bn bid for Swiss pesticides group Syngenta...

Have you heard the one-liner about banks being badly run technology firms with a sideline in finance? It may be a poor joke but many a true word is spoken in jest. Investment banks spent an estimated US$32bn in 2015 on front to back office IT services, according to Boston Consulting Group’s Expand Research. The scale of their spending is far larger once activities such as trade processing and tech development are included. But there are few smiles from the bankers signing off on these budgets. This is not discretionary spending on new...

Politicians, bank regulators, supervisors and central bankers the world over have spent close to 10 years trying to eradicate the root causes of the 2007–08 global financial crisis. Bank leaders have spent the same period trying to modify and mould the structures and profiles of their institutions to meet the requirements and obligations of what has become a veritable regulatory onslaught. But has the regulatory tsunami started to lose its most potent force, as unintended consequences are finally acknowledged, and as populist tendencies to...