The Asset Magazine

5 days ago | theasset.com | Jayde Cheung

While corporates pared down social bond issuance with the cooling of interest in such products following the arrival of the new US presidential administration, global financial institutions and supernational issuers picked up the slack in the first quarter of 2025 to narrow the decline, according to a recent report.

1 week ago | theasset.com | Bayani Cruz

The Federal Reserve has kept its key interest rate unchanged, but its chairman Jerome Powell warns that sustained tariffs on trade partners could lead to higher inflation, slower growth, and increased unemployment. The federal funds target rate was left at 4.25% to 4.5% for the third straight meeting of the policy-making Federal Open Market Committee on May 7 ( early Thursday morning in Hong Kong ), after being cut three times in a row last year.

1 week ago | theasset.com | Keith Mullin

Browsing the leading US banks' recently published proxy statements and leading European banks' annual reports, I scanned the sections on competitors to see which each firm lists as peers to see if anything had materially changed. It hadn't. But watch that space. The competitor lists in those documents are compiled mainly for purposes of tracking industry-wide compensation, executive exit risk and other factors.

1 week ago | theasset.com | Chito Santiago

International Finance Corporation ( IFC ), the private sector arm of the World Bank Group, priced on April 29 its inaugural benchmark public bond denominated in Hong Kong dollars, amounting to HK$5 billion ( US$650 million ). The transaction marks the first Hong Kong dollar-denominated social bond issued in a public format by a supranational. The three-year offering, also labelled as a social wonton bond, was priced at par with a similar coupon and re-offer yield of 3.123%.

2 weeks ago | theasset.com | Keith Mullin

Perusing US equity underwriting and sales and trading earnings data for the first quarter recently, I was once again struck by the extent to which the underwriting business is becoming - or in truth has already become, certainly in the case of initial public offerings ( IPOs ) - a rounding error in the grand scheme of equity investment banking, that is, compared with equity sales and trading. ( European numbers tend to follow the same pattern so there are no grand expectations here.