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Morgan Stanley has switched to using credit-default swap spreads instead of cash bond spreads as inputs to its in-house model used to predict whether a company's debt is cheap or expensive.

Morgan Stanley is merging Asian credit and interest-rate derivatives marketing, according to industry watchers.

Morgan Stanley has lost a senior trader from its Japan equity business, Kiyoko Hashimoto, who headed up index trading at the firm for the last 10 years.

Quantitative analysts are trying to figure out how to tranche constant proportion debt obligations in order to work credit correlation plays into the structures.

Priya Nair, global head of credit structuring at Citigroup in London, has taken the additional role of head of structured credit syndicate.

SG Corporate & Investment Banking has hired Varya Nuttall, a senior synthetic emerging market credit structurer, from Citigroup in London.

Newcastle Building Society, a U.K. thrift with over GBP3.8 billion (USD7.4 billion) in group assets, is offering a twist on a property-linked investment bond for more cautious investors.

--Heiko Ebens, equity-linked analyst at Merrill Lynch in New York, on the firm's new equity arbitrage index.

HBOS crossed a watershed in the relationship between covered bonds and the dollar market this week, by selling 78% of a $3bn 10 year mortgage covered bond to US investors.

Merrill Lynch won a loan auctioned off by Franklin Templeton Wednesday with a winning bid of 101 3/4.

A U.S. appeals court in New York has overturned a lower court decision that the industry said undermined credit-default swap contracts.

Citigroup has hired Hans Peter Lorenzen, v.p. in European credit products strategy, from a similar role at BNP Paribas in London. He joined last month focusing on single-name credit-default swaps, to replace Roberto Fumagalli, who moved internally to structured credit sales. He reports to Matt King, head of European quantitative credit strategy and analysis. At BNP, he reported to Vivek Tawadey, head of credit strategy, who said he has not yet been replaced.