Call for commercial awareness topics!

[Lawyerwithadream]

I would encourage everyone to stay on top of articles related to interest rates and inflation because those two themes impact nearly every aspect of the commercial and legal world.

Aside from that, I would try and focus on maybe three or four other areas that accord with areas of law you are interested in. If you want to do corporate or banking, it is worth subscribing to M&A, private equity, capital markets., and banking topics under the FT's "MyFT" feature. If you are interested in certain sectors like technology or life sciences, select those industries to stay up to date with.

What areas of law are you interested in?

Thanks a lot Jake! I’m interested in M&A and capital markets

 

[Jake Rickman]

Thanks a lot Jake! I’m interested in M&A and capital markets

Definitely follow M&A and private equity as topics on the FT. My point about interest rates/inflation also doubly holds because interest rates are almost certainly the biggest driver for both equity and debt capital markets.

On the equity side, higher interest rates creates more market uncertainty which can devalue equity shares due to the perceived risk that higher rates will spur on a recession, which leads to lower revenue, higher expenses, and lower profit for most traded companies. Likewise, borrowers are less likely to turn to debt capital markets to raise money from bond proceeds and leveraged loans because higher interest rates directly correlates to higher costs of credit in the form of paying more for interest. This leads to lower volumes of deal activity for banks as book runners and underwriters to the debt issuances.

 

[Dervise2001]

Hi,

I was wondering when developing our commercial awareness, what questions shall we be asking ourselves as we are reading news articles in order to dismantle a news article and become more"commercially aware"

Thank you!