QIC
Team Australia hits the road to fulfil expanded issuance task
The early weeks of 2025 suggested markets are picking up where they left off at the end of the previous year: ample liquidity and generally favourable issuance conditions for good-quality borrowers despite periodic volatility prompted by a febrile geopolitical environment. Australia’s high-grade issuers enter the year with plenty of funding to do and – in the case of semi-governments – heightened scrutiny on their debt burdens. KangaNews and National Australia Bank gathered a group of female leaders from the issuer and investor spaces to discuss the market outlook.
Bringing together the Australian and Canadian high-grade sectors
In October, in a KangaNews Women in Capital Markets Yearbook first, KangaNews and RBC Capital Markets brought together Australian semi-government and Canadian high-grade issuers, and Australian institutional investors to discuss the increasing crossover between the two borrower sectors and how they fit into global capital markets.
Summing up the corporate equation
The KangaNews Corporate Debt Summit 2024 took place on 17 October, a matter of weeks after the Australian dollar corporate bond market passed its record for full-year issuance volume (see p21). Speakers discussed the prospects for a newly vibrant local debt funding option, and an economic and business environment where cautious optimism is the mood of the day.
Sustainable debt market reaches for higher branches
For the past five years, Commonwealth Bank of Australia and KangaNews have conducted an annual survey of Australian fixed-income investors on their views of the key issues in sustainable finance. The 2024 survey shows investors are facing a range of challenges in the sector – hurdles the market will need to overcome if it is to deliver on its potential and maximise the amount of capital it can mobilise to support the transition.
Global market view as rates inflection point looms
Thinking in global markets is turning hard to the nature of the looming inflection point for monetary policy. Central banks may not cut, or at least not far, unless the pain being felt in global economies metastasises into unemployment and other symptoms of spare capacity. Despite this uncertainty – and many others – issuers were able to make hay in H1, including in an Australian market that has experienced unprecedented scale and consistency of demand. Participants at the annual ANZ-KangaNews global funding roundtable, which took place in London in June, surveyed the landscape.
AOFM’s green debut achieves greenium but book size fails to excite
The first Australian sovereign green bond achieved a quantifiable greenium for the Australian Office of Financial Management but speculation outside the deal group that it might deliver a blowout book did not come to pass. Support built primarily in the Australian time zone, though deal sources insist an overnight price revision masks solid demand out of Europe.
