Welcome to newsline. Its wednesday, february 27th, im Catherine Kobayashi in tokyo. Egyptian authorities have suspended all hot air balloon flights in luxor following a deadly accident in the ancient city. A balloon carrying 21 people crashed into a field. 19 people died. A witness told nhk a fire broke out and burned half of the balloons basket. He says he saw the pilot and a passenger jump out. He says the balloon rose higher as the flames spread. Then it crashed into a sugar cane field. Civil aviation minister wai al madawi visited the site of the accident. He says a committee from the ministry will investigate. Luxor provincial Officials Say four japanese are among the dead. A Japanese Travel Agency confirmed theyre two married couples from tokyo. The casualties also include touris from britain and hong kong. Translator the basket of the doomed balloon was engulfed in flames within seconds. Luxor is located about 500 kilometers south of cairo. Its one of egypts most popular sightse
Welcome to newsline. Its wednesday, february 27th, im Catherine Kobayashi in tokyo. Egyptian authorities have suspended all hot air balloon flights in luxor following a deadly accident in the ancient city. A balloon carrying 21 people crashed into a field. 19 people died. A witness told nhk a fire broke out and burned half of the balloons basket. He says he saw the pilot and a passenger jump out. He says the balloon rose higher as the flames spread. Then it crashed into a sugar cane field. Civil aviation minister wai al madawi visited the site of the accident. He says a committee from the ministry will investigate. Luxor provincial Officials Say four japanese are among the dead. A Japanese Travel Agency confirmed theyre two married couples from tokyo. The casualties also include tourists from britain and hong kong. Translator the basket of the doomed balloon was engulfed in flames within seconds. Luxor is located about 500 kilometers south of cairo. Its one of egypts most popular sight
As hikers prepare to descend on Mount Fuji now that climbing season has opened, it’s worth celebrating the achievements of the nation’s female climbers both above and below the clouds
GlobalCapital: How has Covid-19 changed your approach to ESG?
Kazuyuki Aihara, Nomura: Covid-19 had a major impact on the bond market. Covid-19 response bonds were issued in large numbers and, as a result of that, the social bond market got bigger. That is one major impact of the pandemic on the sustainable financing market. The pandemic also changed how issuers view the markets, particularly by encouraging them to consider shorter-term funding.
The major impact we have seen, however, is that the vulnerability of the world became clear and that threw questions of sustainability into sharp relief. That was not necessarily reflected in rising issuance. Of course, we saw some Covid-19 bonds but green bond issuance did not really increase. Still, the market started to pay more attention to sustainability and what it means in practice. That is going to help this market grow in the long term.
GlobalCapital
GlobalCapital: How did you adjust your funding plans and your business strategy in response to the pandemic?
Yoshitaka Hidaka, JBIC: Needless to say, the pandemic affected JBIC’s funding strategy as well as our business strategy in a significant way. Let me go back to our funding plan in February 2020. At that time, which was around when Covid began to spread, we were planning a bond issue. Because of the increase in market volatility, we decided not to go ahead and instead to wait for calmness to be restored to the market.
How did we fund ourselves in the meantime? We just tried to tide ourselves over by using short-term bond issues. We used the dollar-yen swap to fund ourselves with short-dated dollars. That was a reasonable solution for the short term, but since our assets are long term we wanted to issue a long-term bond. Our plan for the February issuance was a 10 year bond but we changed that to three to five year maturities because of the sharp rise in