DESPITE A FLURRY of new corporate bond issues last
month, debt capital markets teams haven't exactly been run
off their feet since the middle of the year. It's been tough
to get stand-alone corporate deals done. And bankers have had
a lot more time to get in front of corporate clients and
pitch ideas about other funding options.
In the light of extreme volatility in public bond markets,
corporates have compelling reasons to fund themselves through
EMTNs. Most cannot be choosy and need to be able to take advantage
of pockets of investor demand, however small or large,
opportunistically. They cannot hang around for the documentation to
be completed to do stand-alone public issues.
There are some bright spots. Money-market funds looking to pick
up yield have bolstered demand for public MTNs of one to two years'
maturity. Yet overall corporate deal flow in EMTNs is well down on
last year and was...
