Private placements are as much a feature of the debt market as they are the equity market. During the height of the financial crisis legendary investor Warren Buffett and a number of sovereign wealth funds provided chunky capital injections to prop up the banking sector through the private placement of shares.

Perhaps the most notable of these was the $10bn (€7.1bn) Goldman Sachs raised privately in September 2008 from Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway and other investors.