Stein Sjølie, director at Finance Norway, on home-grown initiatives to boost secondary market liqudity, the importance of top tier LCR status for covered bonds, and more.

The European Banking Authority (EBA) has excluded covered bonds from assets it has recommended should be eligible as extremely high quality liquid assets for Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR) purposes in a report to the European Commission.

The EBA on 20 December published its final recommendations on the Liquidity Coverage Ratio (LCR), which exclude covered bonds from Level 1 status. Crédit Agricole CIB’s Florian Eichert takes a closer look at the potential implications, and sees investor behaviour only really changing in response to a lower minimum rating criterion. 

Svenska Handelsbanken printed the first bank capital issue of 2014 on Tuesday, a Eu1.5bn (Skr16bn) 10 year non-call five subordinated bond that was swamped with demand to pave the way for the tightest pricing of a Tier 2 issue since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, according to a lead syndicate banker.

Nordea Bank Finland got the ball rolling in euro benchmark covered bonds in 2014 when it priced one of the first deals of the year on Tuesday, with Eu8.5bn across nine issues priced by today (Thursday), including one for Norway’s Sparebanken Vest.