Pre-migration untagged articles

The outstanding notional principal in the CDS market plummeted in 2008, it was announced this week, with compression firm TriOptima accounting for the lion’s share of the tear ups.

The Bank of England’s Asset Purchase Facility bought a sizeable amount of commercial paper last week, figures released on Friday show. Use of the fund had seemed to be winding down, with the fund buying £76m in the last week of March, £50m in the first week of April and only £15m in the second week of April. The fund had previously bought an average of £378m since the introduction of the scheme. But last week, the APF bought $345m and this week bought $125m, showing that use of the scheme remains attractive.

Citigroup reported a net income of $1.6bn and total revenues of $24.8bn, in its first quarter 2009 results released on April 17. Vikram Pandit, chief executive of Citi said: "we had our best overall quarter since the second quarter of 2007."

Kommunalbanken and Nestlé sold new five and six year Swiss franc bonds, respectively, this week, with low rates at the short end but growing expectations of inflation in the longer term concentrating demand in the middle part of the curve.

Morgan Stanley struck a discordant note in a week dominated by better-than-expected bank results when it revealed it had made a first-quarter loss of $177m, more than forecast.

Dealers of private EMTNs: Non-syndicated deals excluding financial repackaged SPVs, GSE issuers, self-led deals and issues with a term of less than 365 days

Nomura is bucking the market downturn and this week announced details of its recent hiring of eight analysts for its London office. Nomura says it plans to recruit eight more by the summer. It will bring the entire research team to 150 when complete.

At the Association of Corporate Treasurers conference, there were some wholesome ideas.

Huge Schuldschein loans were a big hit for corporate borrowers last year when issuing in the bond market became prohibitively expensive. But that trend has died away this year, according to UniCredit research. While the market has almost retained its overall size, deal numbers are up and deal sizes are down.

The following charts show the top five advancers and decliners in terms of % moves in the loan, bond and credit default swap markets for the previous week. Data provided by Markit Group.

The $4.5 billion San Bernardino County (Calif.) Employees Retirement Association may add up to two or three relative value and credit managers per month for the rest of the year to reach its target allocation of 5% to credit players.