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* Crédit Local de France Rating: Aa1/AA+

CREDIT SUISSE First Boston launched its Triangle Funding II collateralised loan obligation this week, but had to scrap the deal's intended five year series of tranches, and divert six subordinated tranches into the private placement market. CSFB cut the overall size of the deal from $3bn to $2.5bn. "Sentiment in the market has got worse since last week, and spreads are widening across the board, whether you look at senior credit card deals or straight investment grade bonds," said John Fleming, director of syndicate at CSFB in London. "Even though our deal, like UBS's, is delinked, there is a lot of anxiety about banks.

MORE DETAILS have emerged about JP Morgan's latest leveraged CLO, Bistro Trust 1998-4, launched late last week. The deal's $282.5m of public bonds comprised $127.5m of triple-A rated floaters paying 20bp over three month Libor and a Baa2 rated tranche. That piece divided into $95m of fixed rate bonds yielding 225bp over Treasuries with a coupon of 6.96% and $60m of floaters at 164bp over Libor. Maturity for the whole deal is September 2001.

* Paribas has added the first new transaction in over a year to its French domestic asset backed commercial paper conduit Thésée, with a Ffr500m facility for transport group Mory. The French company specialises in rapid delivery of parcels from 5kg to 2 tonnes, and has a turnover of Ffr2.5bn.

UK RETAIL finance company Paragon issued its third securitisation of the year this week, with a £181m deal that for the first time parcelled only Paragon's newly written mortgages. Paragon, formerly called National Home Loans, has altered its origination and underwriting practices since it ran into problems with high defaults after the UK's housing recession in the early 1990s.

In a credit contingent contract, payment is dependent on the occurrence of a certain credit event.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) established a new bridgehead for foreign borrowers in the Australian domestic market this week with its debut A$1bn transaction. Although bankers do not believe that the deal will presage a tidal wave of Kangaroo issues, all agreed that it had laid the successful foundations for what could become an important future market sector, should investors continue to seek triple-A rated proxies for dwindling sovereign and semi-sovereign supply.

Asia's only internationalised and thriving domestic debt market stands in danger of being brought to its knees following moves by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) to close speculative loopholes. Hong Kong debt market players were incensed by the government's latest action to stem pressure on the currency's peg to the US dollar by virtually closing down the Hong Kong dollar bond market.

The US retail preferred market witnessed a mini-onslaught from Australian banks this week with the launch of competing transactions by ANZ and National Australia Bank (NAB). Both banks used a proprietary structure designed by Merrill Lynch known as TrUEPrS (Trust Units Exchangeable for Preferred Shares) to improve their tier 1 ratios with transactions which partially mimic debt but count as equity for tax and regulatory purposes.

* Samsung Electronics said this week that it will halve the size of its planned jumbo domestic bond issues following government pressure on the back of mounting yields. What would have been the largest single corporate bond deal in Korea's history has now been halved to Won500m ($360m) and will be launched three days later than scheduled on September 25.

Malaysia Moody's Investors Services and Standard & Poor's downgraded Malaysia to just one notch above junk status this week, with Moody's dropping the sovereign's long term rating one notch from Baa2 to Baa3 and S&P by two notches from BB+ to BBB-.

Morgan Stanley Dean Witter has won the advisory mandate for the planned sale of Bangkok Metropolitan Bank and Siam City Bank, nationalised earlier this year, as the consolidation of the Thai banking sector continues apace. The factor which clinched the advisory role in the face of competition from Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Merrill Lynch was reportedly Morgan Stanley's willingness to cut its fee in the event of falling short on its promises.