News

Transactions in the Australian market trickled through in the week leading up to Christmas, largely from financial institutions. KangaNews thanks its subscribers for their support in 2021 and will return in the first week of 2022.

Corporate and government-sector issuers from New Zealand took massive steps forward in sustainable debt funding in the last quarter of 2021 as a flood of transactions came to market. Issuers tapped the domestic, Australian and euro bond markets for use-of-proceeds funding while the steady flow of sustainability-linked loan facility completions also continued.

European Investment Bank is accelerating issuance of use-of-proceeds sustainability bonds, breaking new ground in noncore currencies and leading the development of sustainable finance. In 2021, the supranational also recorded its best Kangaroo issuance year since 2010, driven largely by its sustainability programme. Dominika Rosolowska, sustainability funding officer, and Jorge Grasa, public markets funding officer, at EIB in Luxembourg, discuss the future of the bank’s bond programme.

KangaNews and RBC Capital Markets hosted their annual Australian bank funding roundtable in November 2021 at an important juncture for the sector. The pandemic – or, more accurately, the government and central-bank response to the pandemic – had a profound impact on Australian major-bank funding.

Answering a referral from the federal treasurer, the Australian parliament’s tax and revenue committee published a report in October 2021 with 12 recommendations designed to kickstart a local retail corporate bond market. Market participants – including several who appeared at committee public hearings during the pre-report inquiry – are cautiously optimistic about the outcome.

Jason Falinski, federal member for Mackellar and chair of the House of Representatives’ standing committee on tax and revenue, discusses the committee’s inquiry into the Australian corporate bond market and how he hopes it will stimulate retail issuance.

Australia’s corporate debt market has performed well despite two years of pandemic-related disruption to businesses and – at times – market function. Participants at a Fitch Ratings-KangaNews roundtable at the end of 2021 discuss market evolution, the 2022 outlook and the prospect of further sustainability integration into fixed income.

COVID-19 has profoundly affected how people work, especially in largely urban, professional industries like capital markets. As part of the 2021 Australian Securitisation Forum virtual conference, leaders with a range of perspectives shared their views on whether the shift to wide-scale home working will persist in the long term, how it affects equity across the workforce – particularly through a gender lens – and the value of face-to-face working.