End of a drought?

The successful issuance of an innovative £400 million linker by Anglian Water last month is the first sign there may still be life in the otherwise barren corporate inflation-linked market. Christopher Jeffery reports

Treasurers at UK-listed corporates with regulated earnings, such as water companies and other utilities, have faced a tough time in the past year trying to optimise the match between their future assets and liabilities. While most are keen to match off their inflation-linked revenues by issuing more inflation-linked bonds (linkers) – or more recently, conventional bonds that are synthetically transformed into inflation issues through the use of inflation swaps – market dynamics have