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Houses including Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank have started trading leveraged loan credit-default swaps, market officials reported.

Bart Broadman, who until this spring was vice chairman, Asia-Pacific, at JPMorgan, has teamed with Philippe Khuong-Huu, former head of Goldman Sachs' global interest rate products group, to form AlphaDyne Asset Management.

Five-year credit-default swap spreads on General Motors Corp. started trading upfront last week on continued problems for the car maker, including eroding market share.

Lehman Brothers is moving its equity volatility trading team from Tokyo to Hong Kong to target increasing market in non-Japan Asia, said Jonathan Wharton, spokesman in Hong Kong, confirming the team move and declining to further comment.

Credit-default swap traders are eager to gauge investor reaction to a large European high-yield bond which will hit the market this week.

Moody's Investors Service has updated its synthetic collateralized debt obligation rating model to include a framework for emerging market transactions.

Investors are remaining faithful to the credit-default swap market, in spite of a sharp increase in chatter about leveraged buyouts and mergers and acquisitions--usually connected with spiraling credit spreads.

Nikko Citigroup has hired Takahiro Yamanashi, v.p. in equity derivative sales at Lehman Brothers in Tokyo, as a v.p. in the equity derivative group covering private-placement convertible bonds structuring and marketing.

PIMCO Europe is adding an emerging market synthetic collateralized debt obligation to its management portfolio.

An index of credit-default swaps on residential mortgages, launching early next year, could be a big fillip to firms looking to structure baskets of synthetic asset-backed securities.

Structured investment vehicles are focusing on restructuring AAA tranches' rather than selling as many investors feared in the immediate aftermath of Delphi Corp.'s filing.

As popular as synthetic collateralized debt obligations have become, modeling and pricing these securities continues to provide a number of unique challenges.