Search results for

US ASSET backed issuers roared back into action this week, as investors snapped up over $4bn of credit card paper and a $1.6bn auto lease deal from World Omni. Several of the deals were increased, and spreads appear to have turned the corner, with five year floating rate credit cards offered below 30bp for the first time in weeks. Spread tightening was even more marked in the fixed rate sector, where margins had blown out furthest since the Russian debt default. As swap spreads narrowed, investors regained confidence in fixed rate deals -- issuers crowded into the five year maturity and still did not exhaust demand.

WESTDEUTSCHE Landesbank's London securitisation group, hired en masse from Deutsche Bank in June, has some $2.5bn of mandates that it hopes to put into the bank's Compass Securitisation conduit by the year end. These include one portfolio of car hire purchase contracts and one of auto leases for two UK captive vehicle finance companies, and two pools of trade receivables from UK manufacturers.

IRELAND'S largest mortgage lender, Irish Permanent plc, this week launched the largest securitisation of UK mortgages so far this year, with a £400m deal lead managed by Greenwich NatWest. Auburn Securities 1 parcels almost all the mortgages on the books of Capital Home Loans Ltd, a UK non-bank lender acquired by Irish Permanent in 1996.

* RAKS Holding has become the first Turkish corporate to use securitisation, with a $15m deal backed by future dollar denominated export receivables and arranged by WestLB through its Compass Securitisation conduit. RAKS is a diversified group which manufactures electrical goods and audio and video software, as well as having interests in broadcasting and music and video production.

FRENCH wool processing company Chargeurs may launch its $250m securitisation of trade and contract receivables as early as next week. Bookrunner Merrill Lynch has already placed the deal's two equity pieces, and has found good demand for the $175m to $200m senior tranche, which will be rated A+ by Duff & Phelps and A1 by Moody's.

The analysis and management of options requires that one be able to digest a certain Greek alphabet soup.

Perhaps the people responsible for writing the Deutsche Ausgleichsbank (DtA) activity report read Euroweek after all. A year ago, our German capital markets report said provocatively that it is small wonder that "a country with such ludicrously restrictive laws on retailing has in recent years created virtually no internationally recognised entrepreneur in the mould of the UK's Richard Branson".

When Canada chose the Euro-Deutschmark sector to launch its largest ever foreign currency transaction in June, it sent a clear message about the strategic importance which borrowers from outside the euroland zone attach to the Deutschmark market.

To Ralph Berlowitz, head of debt syndicate at Deutsche Bank's Frankfurt headquarters, by far the most striking characteristic of the German capital market over the first half of 1998 was the speed with which the corporate bond market - long conspicuous in Germany by its virtual absence - evolved.

"Russia! Russia! That is where the weather is coming from!" (Winston Churchill)

For investors lucky enough to have subscribed for (and to have been allotted) Neuer Markt issues at the primary level, Germany's junior stockmarket has been a runaway success.

Good idea, shame about the execution. This still seems to be the verdict on the funding strategy of several of Germany's Länder.