With online debt and equity offerings growing in volume,
bankers and lawyers are rapidly having to adjust their thinking to
new sets of rules - official and unofficial.
Wall Street, Europe - and increasingly Asia - appear to have
decided to embrace online offerings as the way forward and there
has been aggressive online marketing of bond issues. Ford Credit's
$1.2 billion debt issue in January was the first time a
bulge-bracket underwriter, Lehman Brothers, had helped a major US
corporation to raise debt via the web, and it was just one in a
series of online landmarks claimed by underwriters. Some of these
online offerings have been limited to institutional investors but
the World Bank's $3 billion global in mid-January was a
break-through deal - open to both retail and institutional
investors. Goldman Sachs, the World Bank's sole bookrunner,
reported that more than a third of the total issue was sold on the
web, the highest proportion on any online offering...
