For bankers, August was the cruellest month.
Global activity in bond sales, new stock sales and mergers all slumped to their lowest in many months.
Debt capital markets were the slowest since May 2010, with high yield issuance slid to just $1-billion (U.S.) -- the weakest performance since December 2008, according to Thomson Reuters figures recapping the month. In Europe, not a single corporate issue got done in August, according to Societe Generale.
The volume of new stock sales fell 69 per cent from July to $18.7-billion in August. That was the lowest ebb for new issuance since August 2008. Global initial public offering business fell to the weakest since May 2009.
So were bankers busy closing mergers? Nope.
M&A activity was the slowest since October 2010, Thomson said, and would have been worse had it not been for Bank of America . The sale of a stake in the bank to Warren Buffett, and the bank's sale of an interest in a Chinese bank accounted for 7 per cent of all M&A activity globally in August.